


Bygones

by Babblefest, ConstantCommentTea



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Acceptance, Adventure, Flashbacks, Gen, Haunted By Hairstyles-Past, If A Stronger Trigger Warning Applies Please Let Us Know, Memories, No One Likes Dealing With Angel's Past, Violent Sexual Elements, no actual rape though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-03
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-18 17:36:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 27,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1436914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Babblefest/pseuds/Babblefest, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstantCommentTea/pseuds/ConstantCommentTea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angel's always had problems keeping the past buried. But with his problem becoming increasingly literal, the gang must find a way to help Angel while coping with his past for themselves in unexpected and frightening ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Spoilers:** Erm. Just to be safe, everything that Angel has ever experienced up until the episode “Billy” in AtS season 3. You’ll see what we mean.  
>  **Author’s Notes:** This is the first story that Babblefest and I co-authored together. It took us at least six years to write. True story. One of the most fascinating things about Angel's character is the wide range of relationships he becomes involved in, since everyone has a different take on who and what he is (and _was_ ). This is our exploration of that, through making the team members of Angel Investigations face some very difficult qualities of Angel's character and seeing how they react to it (and then having to fix the relationship to keep things canon when they react badly). Hope you enjoy!
> 
> This story takes place between the episodes “Fredless” and “Billy” in Angel season three.

**Bygones**

The night was like any other: balmy with a slight breeze; the stars above washed out in the Los Angeles city lights and haze. Teenagers sauntered along the sidewalks, looking for fun ways to start the night. A tired young mother hurried past the myriad of buildings, a long day of work finally over. Paparazzi slid from shadow to shadow, hoping to find that million-dollar shot. It was a typical scene on a typical night. What they didn’t know was that back in the allies something equally typical was happening – though anyone not used to it would think it quite atypical, indeed. Behind a popular night club, a beast of horrid proportions lay dead with its dark, thick red blood streaming across the pavement and flowing into a sewer drain with a sickening _slosh_. Its neck was almost completely severed and there were several gaping wounds in its leathery side. The mouth hung open to reveal three-inch yellowed teeth, and a sticky blue slime dripped from the entire carcass.

Nearby, Cordelia Chase lay seemingly unconscious in a pile of broken wood, Charles Gunn slumped against the opposite wall, and Angel stood in between the two, his hands on his knees in exhaustion and watching Wesley cut the rest of the head off the beast’s body, just to make sure it was truly dead.

Gunn groaned from his position against the wall and tenderly checked his body for broken bones. All of them sported various injuries; Angel bore a nasty slice on his left arm, while Wesley could feel a small lump growing at the back of his head. There was a sudden commotion from the pile of wood as Cordelia shoved the few planks of wood off herself.

“Is everyone alright?” She asked, taking Angel’s outstretched hand and pulling herself up. Gunn’s fatigued voice echoed from across the alley,

“Well, the demon isn’t.”

“Anyone _we_ care about?” She restated with an impatient sigh.

“We’re fine, Cordelia.” Angel said. “You?”

Cordelia shrugged and gave an accepting half-smile. “What’s a few extra cuts and bruises? They match the ones I got from the Quaylan demon last night. Oh, and that Sherkall last week.” She raised a finger. “And let’s not forget the Warthog the week before that.”

“Nart ‘ogg.” Wesley automatically corrected, wearily pushing himself to his feet and extending an arm to pull Gunn up. Cordelia didn’t respond. She had been inspecting the severity of her new injuries, but instead she noticed the creature’s thick blue goo that was splattered all over her shirt.

“Oh, crap! Someone tell me this washes out!” Cordelia surveyed her new shirt with disgust and made a mental note never to wear brand new clothes to the office again. Gunn glanced down at his own slime-covered jacket, extending his arms and assessing the damage. Angel attempted to brush some off his sleeve, but failed when it stuck to his hand and he had to wipe it off on his pants. Wesley, now realizing he couldn’t see as well as he ought to, took off his glasses and saw that they were specked with the blue substance.

“Oh! Um, yes, I believe so,” he said, unfolding a mercifully unsoiled handkerchief and wiping his glasses. “The blue might stain, but mucus itself is generally not too difficult to wash out.”

“ _What?_ ” Cordy’s head snapped up, her eyebrows raised so high they were practically invisible beneath her messy bangs. Beside her, Angel hastily stopped wiping his sword on his jacket. “Mucus? _Stain?_ ”

 “Whoa, let’s stay on the mucus part,” Gunn leaned closer to Wesley, as if hoping the few inches would change what he heard. “You sure, man? This is demon snot? Last I checked, I don’t sneeze blue.”

“Oh, yes, don’t worry.” Wesley had obviously missed the intent of the question. “The color has nothing to do with its function, which, incidentally, is part of its defense system.” He smiled, “This is most certainly Numar mucus.”

Not noticing the disgusted looks on Gunn and Cordelia's faces or the distastefully wrinkled nose and on Angel's, Wesley proceeded to label his sample.

"There." Wesley said, straightening up after double-checking that the container was tightly sealed. "Well, then, I’ll see you all bright and early tomorrow morning!" He said, smiling cheerfully and pocketing the jar.

"No way, man, I'm sleeping in tomorrow. Since when do we get calls bright and early, anyway?"

"Well, I -"

"Me, too." Cordelia said. "I'm getting this shirt _clean_!" Wesley looked at Angel, his face falling.

"Hey, I _always_ sleep in," Angel shrugged. He wrinkled his nose again. It had a rather bitter odor, not unlike burnt cauliflower. "But maybe Fred will be up to help you." He added as an afterthought. Of its own accord, Wesley’s face suddenly brightened, then turned a delicate shade of pink. 

"Oh, well, yes, I suppose that would be alright."

"Good. I’m going home, then." Cordelia said, wondering how fast Numar mucus dried and if she would have enough stain remover to get every trace of blue out of the fabric.

“I’ll give you a ride,” Gunn offered. Grateful that she didn’t have to take the bus home, Cordy quickly agreed and followed Gunn back down the alley.

"Right,” said Wesley, dislodging his machete from the creature’s throat before helping Angel gather the few remaining weapons to take back to the Hyperion. “What’s really fascinating about the Numar,” Wesley started as they made their way toward Angel’s car, “is that it may have originated in two places simultaneously. Fossilized remains have been found in both Tibet and Mongolia dating from the same time era, give or take a few centuries, of course, and since Numars typically aren’t nomadic, all evidence suggests that they originated in _both_ places, in that sense rendering them entirely unique creatures.” They reached the end of the ally and entered the crowded sidewalk. Angel hoped that the stream of people would drown Wesley out, but he persisted over the babble of loud college students and tourists on their way to one of the many night clubs and bars that lined the street. “In 1863 Vincent Marchfield–”

“Wesley.” Angel turned his head and cut him off finally, only half concentrating on weaving through the people—none of whom took a second look at the sharp, now-slimy-blue weapons that Angel and Wesley were carrying. “It’s late. I’ve had a long night.  Not n—” Angel caught himself as he stumbled into an elderly man. A cheap touristy figurine that the man had been carrying clattered to the ground.

“Sorry,” Angel mumbled, stooping to pick up the object out of habit more than benevolence. The old man grabbed the object out of Angel’s hands with an angry grunt and a curse to “self-absorbed young people,” and hobbled off. Angel, in a rather grumpy mood himself, wanted to shout something about his having well over 150 years on the old man, but thought better of it. Angel crossed the few remaining feet to his car and threw his weapons in a little harder than was probably good for them.

The Numar conversation not forgotten, Wesley pressed on, “But really, Angel. Once you hear Marchfield’s theory on how a species might originate in two sep—” Angel glared once in Wesley’s direction and Wesley cut himself off. Wesley knew when not to provoke a vampire, even if the vampire was a good friend, and this seemed like one of those times. He carefully placed the weapons he was carrying in the car with the rest as Angel slid into the driver’s seat.

Trying to sound cheerful, Wesley said, “Maybe tomorrow, then.”

“Tomorrow.” Angel said as he started the car and drove off, planning to sleep in as late as possible so he would miss Wesley’s lecture to the others the next afternoon.

~~~~

It had been a rough night at Angel Investigations as Angel finally arrived back at his hotel. After helping two terrified people who had called in with zombie problems, Angel, Wesley, Gunn, and Cordelia had come across the Numar demon that had been preparing to devour a young couple. Angel was now covered in cuts, bruises, and the blue mucus that Wesley had been so thrilled to collect.

Exhausted, Angel made his way to his room, washed off the slime, and sank gratefully into his bed. Sleep caught up to him so quickly that he almost didn’t notice the sudden weight that materialized at the end of his bed. Angel opened his eyes and peered into the near complete darkness of the room. A small figure was sitting on the corner of the mattress.

“Fred?” Angel asked. “What’s wrong?” She didn’t answer. Angel reached over to the lamp next to his bed so he could talk to Fred properly.

Angel’s un-beating heart almost seemed to pound in his chest.  As the light filled the room and illuminated the petit brunette who was watching him with her sweet brown eyes, Angel realized with an unrivaled horror that it wasn’t Fred sitting so placidly at the end of his bed.

 Angel blinked, and his sister was gone.


	2. Chapter 2

It was perhaps the strangest thing she’d ever seen, which, considering what she’d been through, was saying something. The forms in front of her eyes were…well…she didn’t know what they were doing. The amoeboid figures were morphing into circles and ovals and back again, colliding with each other, merging, then breaking apart. They were like bubbles that didn’t pop. She frowned. Things used to be so much simpler. There were rules in everything, in physics, chemistry, biology, math…But not anymore. Ever since the day she had been sucked into Pylea, she learned that the rules she had been following her whole life meant nothing, and it turned her whole world upside down. With the help of Angel and the others, who apparently dealt with these new rules all the time, Fred was finally beginning to adapt to them. But every now and then something happened, like this, and it threw her off again.

Fred stood up and reached for the eyeglasses that were resting on her head. She had put them up there to keep them out of the way while she peered through the microscope, but now she slid them back onto her nose and the world came into focus again. The dark green walls of the office lined with book cases, the old wooden desk cluttered with open books, well-used writing pads, and nearly dried-up pens, and Wesley leaning over the lot of it, went unnoticed to Fred as she wrapped herself in her thoughts.

“Fred?” Wesley asked.

Fred jumped at the sound. “Oh,” she smiled, slightly embarrassed. “Sorry, I-I was concentrating.”

“No need to apologize. I was just wondering if you were all right. I noticed you were frowning…”

“Oh. No, I’m fine. I just – I’m confused, that’s all. I’ve never seen anything like this before. I don’t even know how to classify it.” She gestured hopelessly at what was left of the blue substance in the jar. She paused for a moment, thinking. “If I can’t classify it then I don’t know what sort of experiments I should perform to determine its nature. It would really help to know if I’m looking at cells or bacteria, and if I’m looking at bacteria, if it’s foreign, or--” Fred stopped herself, realizing she was talking out loud. “Sorry. Sometimes I forget when I say things out loud. I went for so long with only myself to talk to I forget that thoughts are supposed to be in my head.” She smiled shyly and bent over the microscope, adjusting her glasses again.

“Oh I don’t mind.” Wesley said, perhaps a little too quickly. He shifted his weight. “I mean, if it helps, or…” But Fred was once again engrossed in her observations. Wesley sighed to himself and sat down at his desk where his own observations lay in front of him. Everything was silent in the office for a few moments, save for the gentle clicking of Fred’s microscope as she adjusted the magnification. Wesley was about to return to his work when the sound of the front doors opening and closing out in the lobby broke the silence. A familiar voice called, “Hello? Anyone here?”

“In the office, Cordelia,” Wesley responded. High-heeled shoes click-clacked across the hard floor of the Hyperion, announcing their owner’s arrival long before she entered the office.

“Hi, guys,” Cordy appeared in the doorway, “how’s it going? “She let out an exasperated sigh as her eyes fell on the glass slides that were blued with the very substance she had spent the better part of two hours trying to be rid of the night before. “You’re still staring at that stuff?”

“Yes, we are. It’s quite intriguing, actually,” Wesley leaned forward to find his more interesting notes to show her.

Cordelia held up a halting hand. “I’ll take your word for it. I, for one, learned all I need to know about that stuff last night – that it doesn’t wash out easily.” Cordelia plopped herself down on one of the chairs farthest from the desk.

“Morning guys,” a deep voice mumbled somewhere near the door. Cordelia, Wesley, and Fred turned.

“Morning?” Cordelia objected, double-checking her watch. “Angel, it’s 4:30 – in the _afternoon_. Have you been sleeping this whole time?”

“I…was tired. I only slept in a few hours.” Angel shifted uncomfortably. Cordelia’s gaze was undeniably questioning whether he’d had any blonde nighttime visitors, like the one sent by Wolfram and Hart just last year. Angel shifted again, clearing his throat.

“So, Wesley, find anything, uh, interesting?” Angel hoped this would throw the attention somewhere _not_ on him. Especially when he _had_ had a nighttime visitor – of an extremely different variety.

“Yes, actually. Well, interesting to me, anyway,” Wesley said with a glare in Cordelia’s direction. “Though I doubt you find analgesic agents interesting.”

Angel sighed to himself. The one time Wesley decided to be sensitive to the boredom of others…

“I don’t,” Cordelia piped up, examining a chip in her nail polish, either oblivious to or ignoring Wesley’s slight hostility.

“Do you even know what an analgesic agent is, Cordelia?” Wesley asked.

“Nope.”

Wesley rolled his eyes and turned back to his notes, leafing through to find a particular one. Silence fell and the only audible sound to the group was Wesley shuffling papers – except for Angel. He had been about to leave when bright, clear singing had started reverberating through the room—and only Angel seemed to be noticing it.

“Wesley?” Angel started.

“Yes?” Wesley looked up expectantly.

“Or Fred, you know, whoever.” Angel tried to appear nonchalant, but the fact that he was hearing his very-dead family sing along with the choir at his very-former church when no one else could was more than slightly unnerving. “Um, you didn’t happen to come across any hallucinogenic properties, in that stuff, did you?”

A thoughtful frown crossed Wesley’s face. “No, nothing like that. Er, why, may I ask?”

Angel hesitated. “I just had a weird dream last night. I thought I saw something, but I must have just been tired.”

“You saw something?” Cordy asked, slightly concerned and nails temporarily forgotten.

“Yeah, but like I said, it’s no big deal. It’s not like strange dreams are uncommon, right?” The hymn finished and faded away with the rustles and creaks of dozens of people re-seating themselves on old wooden pews.

“Right…” Wesley said uncertainly.

Angel nodded. “Right.”

Angel left the room, Cordelia following suit not long after.

~~~~

Angel tried to keep his mind off of the hallucinating incidents all day, doing his best to convince himself that it was just his tired eyes playing tricks on him and the singing was simply a mental flashback brought on by the vision the night before. It was a difficult pretense to hold, as shouts of laughter rang out periodically through the day and the hems of long skirts and old-fashioned cloaks kept disappearing through doors. For a moment while he was sipping dinner, Darla’s scent overpowered him so much he would’ve sworn she was right behind him had he not turned and seen nothing there. Once, Angel was positive Spike’s bleach-blonde hair and dark coat whipped around a corner, and there was no mistaking the deep, eerily calm voice of Daniel Holtz ringing in Angel’s ears as though Holtz had just spoken. Angel spent the remainder of the day in restless motion, not liking to stay too long in one place. Even though where he was didn’t seem to have an effect on how often the hallucinations occurred, the movement was a welcome, if slight, distraction.

The evening was otherwise uneventful. The phone sat quietly on the front desk, and Cordy occupied her vision-free mind with small tasks that only seemed to get done when she did them. Wesley and Fred continued their work in the office, and Gunn had buried himself behind a newspaper.

For perhaps the hundredth time that day Angel descended the stairs into the lobby of the Hyperion. He glanced around at the bottom, looking for anything to distract him. He noticed Cordelia at her desk and ambled over to the counter to make conversation. Angel wasn’t good at small talk, but he was getting desperate.

“She wants you to touch her.”

 Angel froze. Jenny Calendar stood behind Cordy, who was entirely oblivious to her former schoolteacher.

“What are you waiting for?” Jenny asked.

Angel shook his head. Cordy glanced up and frowned.

“Angel, are you alright?”

Jenny looked at Angel in the eyes. “She wants you to taste her.”

“Angel?” Cordy sat up a little straighter.

“Yeah,” Angel choked. “I’m fine.”

“Think of the peace.” Jenny urged. “You’ll never have to see us again.” She faded away and Angel stared at the empty space a few seconds too long.

“What’s going on?” Cordy asked suspiciously.

Angel jolted. “Nothing,” he replied, a bit too quickly. “Just…” he drummed his fingers against each other as he searched for the right word. “Brooding.”

Cordy shook her head disbelievingly and returned to her work. Angel looked around the lobby again. Distraction, he needed a distraction. He made his way over to the weapons cabinet and swung open the doors. Axes, swords, stakes, daggers, and a whole collection of other such deadly objects glinted at him. All sharpened, all cleaned, all organized, all hanging perfectly in place –all done by Angel earlier. Angel glared at the weapons. Where was an earthquake when you needed one? He sighed and slowly closed and latched the doors. He looked around again and his eyes fell on the doors to the garden. He hadn’t tried that yet, and the sun had set more than 30 minutes ago.

Angel let the door click softly behind him as he meandered down the steps. It wasn’t a spectacular garden, as none of them had the time or interest to maintain it, save for pulling out the bigger, nastier weeds, but several perennials grew and their smells mixed pleasantly. The scents of lavender, a few roses and lilies, and a bit of jasmine wafted over him and helped calm his somewhat frayed nerves.

He wandered over to the jasmine and fingered the soft petals.

“So beautiful. So pale. Night-blooming. Like the stars. Like me. Am I a star? They tell me so, but then they see how dark I am and then they go away. It’s not nice to go away and leave people all alone. Is it?”

“No, Dru, not nice at all.” Angelus snaked one hand around her waist from behind, the other hand affectionately fingering her dark hair. He leaned in closed to her ear. “Did you tell them that?”

“No, I ate them. Now they beg for mercy, but it’s too late. The sun comes back and the stars burn away. They hide and no one can find them. ‘Ready or not…’ Time tick tocks away and no one cares anymore. Why do they get so angry when no one will care?” Angelus sighed and let his hands slip away as she moved on to find the perfect Jasmine bloom to adorn her hair. She had seemed almost coherent for a moment, but as usual she fell back into babbling nonsense.

“Are you hungry?” he asked her. “Let’s go find some dinner.”

“Dinner? Isn’t it a little late for that?” Fred’s voice jolted Angel back to the present. He turned to face her.

“Oh, uh, yeah, I guess it is.” He said distractedly, playing along while recovering from the longest...what was it? Dream? Hallucination?...yet.

“Angel, are you alright?” She asked, concerned, cautiously descending the steps into the garden. Angel couldn’t seem to find words to answer her. He rubbed the back of his head trying to process what had happened. “It’s the dream you had last night, isn’t it?” She said softly, and stopped a few feet away from him. “It’s ok to dream, you know. I had a dream last night, too.” Angel looked up and caught her eyes, hope filling him that he might not be the only one having strange hallucinations.

“It was a weird one. I was being chased on skis down this mountain by a giant pencil and suddenly I was in the lodge and a bunch of people were having a party near the sign for the rentals, and Gunn and Wesley were dancing the polka. Was your dream weird like that?”

Somewhat taken aback by the mental image of Gunn and Wesley dancing the polka, and disappointed that in comparison to what he was seeing Fred’s dream was perfectly normal, it took Angel a moment to answer. “Uh, no. It was a little different.”

Fred took a few more cautious steps forward. “Was it one of those normal dreams that seem so real you can’t tell at first if it was even a dream? I used to have those all the time in Pylea. I’d dream I was back at home eating mom’s waffles with whipped cream and strawberries fresh-picked from the garden. It tasted so real that when I woke up I couldn’t remember where I was. Then when I remembered, all I wanted to do was go back to sleep so I wouldn’t have to stay in my cave anymore. Just before you rescued me, I was beginning to wonder if dreams were the only way back home. But it wasn’t. I know that now.” Fred gave Angel a small, reassuring smile, which he returned.

“Fred, what if…” Angel began and hesitated a moment. “What if you’re not trying to get home, you’re just trying to get back to reality?”

Fred glanced around the garden as she thought for a moment, biting her lip, and then met his eyes. “I don’t know. I thought home was my dreams, and until you showed me it wasn’t, I kept trying to get back there. Your home is reality, and I’m still trying to figure reality out.”

“Let me know when you do, ok?”

“Ok.”


	3. Chapter 3

There was no denying it: something was definitely wrong. The fact, however, that no one else seemed to be having strange hallucinations and, very occasionally, short conversations with people from their pasts made Angel less want to admit to his own visions. Something told him that if they couldn’t see, hear, or feel them then it was entirely in Angel’s own mind, thus it could be controlled and it was none of their concern. Plus, many of the memories that came up were either shameful or downright embarrassing, and well off the list of mentionable subjects.

Angel spent the entire next day following the incident in the garden trying to suppress the images of his past while perusing a few books in search of an answer. He was dismayed to find that, not only were they getting more frequent, but more engaging, as well. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the image of his first child-victim spread out on his bedroom floor or the brief but overwhelming and painful flashback of when he was first cursed with a soul that made him finally seek out Wesley to ask again about the possible hallucinogenic properties in Numar mucus. No, it was the Barry Manilow concert: live, on stage, and in his very own living room.

Wesley was reading in his office when Angel ambled in. “Hey, Wes, how’s it going?” He asked. Wesley looked up.

“Er…Fine, thank you. And yourself?”

“Great, I am great! Never better.” Angel added a smile for good measure.

“Eh, did you want something, Angel?” Wesley took off his glasses, anticipating a longer conversation than simple greetings.

“Oh, no, I was just seeing how you’re doing. You know, with your research…and….stuff…and life! How’s life, Wesley? Good? Mine’s good. I mean, not that I would…know…about life. Being dead…” Angel glanced down cleared his throat awkwardly.

“Angel, are you sure there isn’t something you wanted?”

“No, no, I’m just taking an interest in what you do, Wesley.” Angel ambled over to the desk to look at Wesley’s notes as if to prove his words. “Can’t I do that? I mean, can’t friends take an interest in what their friends are doing?”

“Of course they can, but-“

“Great! So show me what you’ve been up to. Made any new discoveries, found any…” Angel took a breath, leafing through the pages of notes absentmindedly, “strange anomalies?”

Wesley sighed impatiently. “Angel, what’s this about?” Angel made and broke eye contact with Wesley several times before sighing and sitting down in the chair in front of Wesley’s desk. In a lowered voice he said, “I’ve been seeing…things.”

Wesley’s eyebrows rose. “What kind of things?”

Angel hesitated. “People, mostly. A lot of people from my past. They come and go; nothing really happens.”

“People from your past?” Wesley leaned forward and frowned, knowing full well this couldn’t mean anything good. “How long has this been going on?”

“Since the night we killed the Numar. It doesn’t happen that much, I don’t think it’s serious. I just thought you should know.”

“I quite agree. Now tell me,” Wesley picked up a pad of paper and a pencil to take notes. “Do they talk to you? Can you hear them, smell them?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, they talk, I hear, I smell. Everything.” Wesley jotted something down.

“And,” Angel added, “this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. A few years ago the First appeared to me like this.”

“You think it’s The First?” Wesley frowned.

“Not necessarily. It feels different. But maybe not, I don’t know.”

“Well, we’ll keep that in mind, then. But let’s gather a bit more information first. Often hallucinations have very simple explanations and I’d like to explore other options. Now, whom have you seen?”

Angel shifted, wondering how many details Wesley was going to press for. “Oh, well, you know. Just random people. Darla, Drusilla, some of my victims…why does it matter?”

“I want to know if there are any common denominators: time period, if they’re living or dead, even where they come from or where you met them. It might lead to some clues as to what’s causing it.”

Angel shifted again, then said, “there doesn’t seem to be any similarities like that. It feels random.”

Wesley jotted something else down. “And when they appear, do-” the shrill noise of the telephone in the other room interrupted Wesley.

“I’ll get it!” Angel jumped up.

“But-“ Wesley protested. But before he could point out that Cordelia was perfectly capable of answering the phone herself, Angel was out of the office and on the phone, jotting down a message and taking no notice of Cordelia’s bewildered and somewhat irked stares.

By the time Wesley made it to the doorway, Angel was hanging up and finishing the notes he was furiously scribbling. “Tip about a vampire nest in Malibu. I’d better take care of it.” He tore the sheet of paper off the pad.

“Yes, I quite agree,” Wesley said as Angel grabbed his coat off the hook. “Why don’t you take Cordelia and Gunn with you? I daresay it’s been a rather quiet evening and -“

“No, it’s ok, I’ve got it,” Angel interrupted, heading for the weapons cabinet with Wesley close behind him.

“I know you’ve ‘got’ it, Angel, I’m just saying –“

“Really Wesley, it’s ok. I’ll be back soon.”

“Angel,” Cordelia said from behind Wesley, “if Wesley _our boss_ wants us to go…” She stared pointedly at him. Angel gave a short sigh.

“Fine, go get Gunn and meet me outside. I’m bringing the car around.” Angel turned and pushed open the door, eager to get out into the night air where he couldn’t smell his sister’s betrayed terror as he drank from her nearly 250 years earlier.

~~~~

 “ _Psst. We're going to destroy the world. Want to come?_ ”  “Not now.” Angel said as he ducked a vampire’s bony fist and sent a blow into the stomach of his attacker. “Hey, you’re the one who picked the fight, not me,” the young vampire said through gasps, moving in for another swing. “ _So mom's like, 'Do you think Ted will like this?' and 'This is Ted's favorite show,'…_ ” Something hard hit Angel’s jaw and sent him sprawling to the floor. 

“ _Darling Boy. Still so young. Still so very young._ ”

 Angel’s head snapped up in time to watch Darla fade into a nameless vampire in a 90’s get-up, but was not quick enough to evade a well-placed kick in the stomach. “ _…and 'Ted's teaching me computers,'…_ ” “Angel, man, a little help here!” Three vampires were closing in on Gunn. Angel got to his feet. The same vampire blocked his path. A punch, a kick, a stake. One down. “ _Come on. When was the last time you unleashed it?_ ” Angel turned to find where Spike’s voice was coming from. “Angel!” Gunn and Cordy’s unison voices echoed somewhere behind him. Angel turned again. Cordy had gotten one of the vampires, but two more were fast approaching. Another kick, and another floored. “ _…and 'Ted said the funniest thing,'…_ ” “ _All out fight in a mob, back against the wall, nothing but fists and fangs?_ ” A vampire grabbed Angel from behind and threw him into the cinderblock wall. When Angel turned to face the assailant, his sharp teeth glistened in the fluorescent light. A second vampire joined, holding a sword. The first kicked, punched, and threw, and Angel was down. “ _…and I'm like, 'That's really great, Mom, and then she said I was being sarcastic '…_ ” Two more caught the end of Gunn’s stake. How many were left? A kick brought Angel back to his own struggle. Looking up he watched the second vampire raise the sword over his head. He watched as it dusted, the sword clanging on the ground. The first vampire stared at Cordelia, stake in hand, temporarily stunned. Recovering quickly, it made for her. “ _…which I was, but I'm sorry if I don't wanna talk about Ted all the time._ ” “Cordy!” Gunn made for Cordy, but got a hit in the stomach. Cordelia was gasping for breath against the far wall. Angel jumped up. 

“ _Don't you ever get tired of fights you know you're going to win?_ ” 

It was dust. Rookie mistake. Let her keep the stake in her hand when he went for the kill.

“ _My only desire here - is to discover if a thing such as yourself can be made to pay for its sins._ ” A blow to his back and Angel was down again. This time he avoided the following kick and was back up in time to aim his fist at the beast’s temple. “ _You're a demon. It is your nature to maim and kill._ ” The brittle bone crushed under Angel’s fist – he felt it, heard it, and something deep inside him purred with savage satisfaction. A kick to the solar plexus, a strike to the exposed back, and a foot to anchor the thing to the floor while the head came off and fell to dust through Angel’s fingers. “ _This one... cannot be burnt. He is clean. There's no humanity in him._ ”


	4. Chapter 4

Wesley let out an exasperated sigh as he closed what must have been the dozenth book he had examined that morning in search for causes of Angel’s mysterious hallucinations. He set it aside on the growing pile of tried texts and picked up one from the diminishing pile of potentials. Ghosts…poltergeists…Not likely.

 _Monger Demon: Though physically harmless, the Monger Demon has been known to drive even the most mentally and emotionally stable individual to the point of insanity due to the uncanny realism and terrifying nature of the nightmares it induces in it’s victim’s sleep._ Angel never said anything about nightmares. These seemed to be more daytime, or awake time, occurrences.

 _Bilt Demon: Leads victims astray with false visions according to the victim’s wants or needs. Money for the beggar, edible plants or a light for the lost and weary traveler, and toys or sweets for children are common examples._ Angel said they were people, though. People from his past. Wesley consulted his notes from their brief conversation the night before. _Talk, hear, smell_. What about touch? Whether or not they were solid would lend a substantial clue. Wesley leaned back in his chair, thinking. Perhaps he should abandon the demons, spirits, and other such creatures books and try for spells, hexes, and curses. Wesley stood, stretching as he did so, for he had been sitting for several hours. He chose several promising books and settled back down.

In sharp contrast to his search for possible demonic culprits, nearly every hallucination-inducing spell Wesley found jumped out at him as a possibility. His notes were no help in narrowing the list; there just was not enough information. Was Angel simply reliving memories of these people, or were they talking to him as if they were in the here and now? If they were memories, did Angel see their surroundings as well, or did only the people appear? Did Angel respond to these people, or merely observe them? Would they respond back?

Frustrated, Wesley took off his glasses to rub his eyes and forehead. He assumed a temporary resting position of his head in his hands, glasses dangling from between his fingers. Perhaps he’d take a break for a while. After all, Angel _had_ said it wasn’t serious…

~~~~

 “Can’t something be done about that horrible noise?” Angelus looked up. Darla’s teasing face, a malicious glint in her eye betraying her civilized tone, smiled at him. The mother’s blood raced through him, hot with adrenaline and fear and for a second he could swear it made his heart beat again. Not that that was at all desirable. But the sensation was intoxicating. The feeling of omnipotent invincibility boiled pleasurably at his core and he smiled back at Darla.

“Do you want to do it, or should I?”

“Do what?”

Angel started. Darla and the dying child in her arms faded away and Angel’s room came back into view. Angel turned in his seat, trying with all his might to suppress the overwhelming feeling of power and shaking the urge for more human blood. Fred had stopped at his open door. If they weren’t careful, they might start a habit of Fred interrupting these visions.

“Uh,” Angel tried to think fast. Distract Fred, distract Fred. “Go get tacos for dinner?” Fred lit up with delight.

“Oh, really? I mean, wow, gosh! Tacos? But,” she became somewhat serious again in her puzzlement, “how can _you_ do it? It’s still daylight.”

“Good point!” Angel stood up and fished his wallet out of his pocket. “I guess you should do it, then. Here,” he gave her a random assortment of bills.

“Wow, ok! I’ll be right back, then!” And she hurried off, leaving Angel to sink back into the chair, his head in his hands, to shake off the remaining feelings and urges from his latest memory.

~~~~

 “Wesley, we need to talk.” Wesley looked up to find Cordelia and Gunn in his office doorway.

“About what?” He leaned back in his chair.

“Angel,” Gunn said, entering and sitting down, Cordelia following suit.

“What about Angel?”

“How ‘bout the fact that a nest of young vamps should have been an easy, run-of-the-mill gig for highly experienced vampire hunters such as ourselves?”

“It wasn’t?”

“Not when your oldest, most invincible asset starts playing like a rookie. Guy didn’t know which way to turn half the time and the other half he was gettin’ pounded by vamps that coulda just risen yesterday. _Cordy_ was fightin’ better than he was.” He paused, then added, “No offense.”

Cordelia waved it off. “It’s true. And truly scary. He wasn’t right, Wesley. He wouldn’t say anything about it on the way home-“

“-which only confirmed that something’s definitely wrong.” Gunn interrupted, and Cordelia nodded in agreement.

Wesley raised his eyebrows. “And you expect me to know what’s bothering him? Such knowledge seems like something Cordelia’s more adept to pry from him.”

“I tried. Both with Gunn and alone, when Angel took me home. _That’s_ why I’m worried.”

“Because you were unable to force your way into his personal life and know exactly what haunts his darkest thoughts?” Wesley goaded.

“Yes! Wesley, I know Angel has limits and I know what the limits are. Last night should not have come so close to those limits. If what distracted him so much is so dark and scary he fought _all_ my efforts—and I tried hard—well, I’m almost afraid of what it is.”

Wesley considered them a moment before speaking. “Angel confided to me yesterday that he’s been, and I quote, ‘seeing people from his past.’ He seemed hesitant to give details other than what was necessary and told me he didn’t think it was serious. I’m willing to wager that that was what distracted him last night.”

“Seeing people? You mean like hallucinations?” Gunn asked, his eyebrows raised in alarm.

“Yes.”

“And people from his past would be like, Darla, Spike, Buffy…?” Cordelia waved her hand, prompting for more information. Wesley sighed.

“I don’t know. As I said, he was not very forthcoming. Here…” he picked up the yellow legal pad on his desk and offered it to Cordelia. “My notes from our conversation; such as they are.” Gunn leaned over to read with Cordy. It didn’t take long. Wesley, after seeing that they were done, said, “Cordelia, perhaps now that you know, could you-“

“-go upstairs and force my way into his personal life and know exactly what haunts his darkest thoughts? Gladly.” She tossed the pad of paper back onto Wesley’s desk.

Wesley sighed with relief. “Good. _Now_ we can make some progress.”

~~~~

Cordy passed Fred on her way up the stairs. The girl was positively bouncing about something or other. Cordy rolled her eyes slightly. Well, Fred _did_ brighten up the place with all that energy, now that she’d finally come out of her room. Goodness knows the place could use a little extra metaphorical sunshine, what with the King of Gloom always—

“I don’t know about…“

Cordy stopped and glanced warily around the empty hall. Disembodied voices, not exactly a good sign. This one sounded familiar, though, in the not-bad kind of way.

“………but I could really………some Jack Daniels right about n…”

Cordy gasped and covered her mouth. Why, _why_ was Doyle’s voice echoing through the halls? She turned to look back the way she came, and her breath lodged in her throat. Doyle strolled down the hall toward her, in step with a slightly younger version of herself. He looked just like she’d remembered, except that both he and her past self kept fading in and out in a strangely holographic way.

“Doyle,” transparent-Cordy asked, “is there ever a time you _couldn’t_ go for………..?”

Part of Cordy wanted to reach out and touch Doyle’s bright blue shirt when they passed by. 

“Sure…” Doyle replied; but they both disappeared before Doyle could finish his sentence. Cordy didn’t need to hear it, though. She still remembered exactly what Doyle had said:

“ _Sometimes I get a hankerin’ for Bailey’s instead._ ”

Cordelia crossed her arms and took a few deep breaths. “ANGEL!”

It took seconds.

“What? Vision?”

Cordy turned around. “You might say that,” she said curtly. “Though I don’t know why the Powers would want you to get Doyle some Jack Daniels. I guess they don’t have it where he is now.”

“Huh?” Angel asked bewilderedly. “Y-you saw…Doyle?”

“ _Yeah_! I saw myself, too, and let me tell you, I’m not liking the ghost-look.”

Angel seemed to have realized what she meant, because he glanced down at the floor and didn’t respond to her.

“You wanna tell me what’s going on with these memories, Angel?” It wasn’t actually a question.

“Wes told you?” he asked, glancing up.

“I kinda knew something was wrong anyway. It’s this sixth sense I have where I keenly observed that you’ve been acting weird for days now.” She paused, and amended, “Weird _er_.”

Angel hesitated and Cordy sighed. “We can start with, ‘Well, Cordy, I’ve been seeing things from my past for the past few days…’ If you want, we can gloss over the why-you-didn’t-tell-us-right-away part for now and get straight to the gory details.”

She didn’t need to reiterate the “for now” part. Angel got the message. He sighed. “The memories have been getting worse,” he said. “At first they were just little things. A glimpse of a person, the sound of their voice, their smell; or sometimes I see old objects lying around.” He paused. “But…lately I’ve been seeing places, too. Surroundings. They’ve become more engaging.”

Cordy frowned. “Engaging how?”

He paused for the briefest second. “Like I’m actually there. Like I’m with them again and it’s happening for the first time. The sights, the sounds, the emotions…It’s really…disorienting.”

Cordelia did not respond for a moment, in thought. “What bring you out of these…memories?”

“I don’t know,” Angel replied. “The moment ends, and I’m back here. Occasionally something will interrupt it, like someone talks to me in real life or I hear a sound, and I’ll realize that it already happened.”

“Can you bring yourself out of it without outside help?”

“I’m not sure,” Angel said. “I’m not really aware of when it’s happening.”

“Sounds like a dream—but in the daytime and when you’re not asleep.”

Angel shook his head, “No, it’s more vivid than that. When you wake up after a dream, you can tell the difference between the dream and reality.”

Cordy raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying you _can’t_ tell the difference between what’s happening now and what already happened?”

“I can tell the difference, logically, but…it feels the same.”

Cordy bit her lip in thought. “Is there anything else?” She finally asked.

“No.” 

Cordy nodded in acknowledgement. “Then I think you should come down and tell Wesley everything you told me. If we’re going to get rid of this…whatever this is, you’ve got to give him all the info you can.”

Angel hesitated. “Now?” he asked.

“Well, yeah. You _do_ want it gone, right?”

“Yes, of course,” Angel said quickly, partially because it was true, but mostly, she knew, to get her piercing stare off him.

“Ok. So. Let’s go.” She took several leading steps toward the stairs to the lobby, and stopped as a huge, lumbering, troll-like creature shuffled by at the end of the hall. “ _Tell_ me that thing’s not actually here,” she said.

“It’s okay,” Angel sighed, now starting on his own down the corridor, “I killed it about a hundred years ago.”


	5. Chapter 5

Angel Investigations had little business over the next few days, which nobody was particularly concerned about (save a bit for Cordy, as no business meant no paycheck), because it left plenty of time to tackle Angel’s problem, which was steadily growing in intensity. Cordy was soon not the only one to happen randomly across a memory. The fact that Angel did not need to be present for them to find a fragment of his memory concerned Wesley somewhat, as it meant that things may soon start appearing outside the hotel. So far, however, the outside world remained blissfully ignorant of the incidents occurring in the office of Angel Investigations.

This increase of appearances of objects and their distance from Angel seemed to concern only Wesley, who spent much of his time attempting to narrow down possible causes and how to counter it. The rest of the team, quite the opposite, were finding it all slightly humorous. Aside from the occasional body they had to stumble over, which gave each of them a scare the first few times it happened (“Man, I do _not_ like this!” Gunn had made sure to let everyone know), the things that appeared were often somewhat interesting. Fred seemed to have made a game out of identifying as many antique items as she could, and those she didn’t know she would look up. Cordelia, on the other hand, was most adept at identifying people who walked through. There was a fleeting image of a young Buffy dancing, presumably at the Bronze, to music that faded in and out of hearing, and once Spike strutted disconcertedly past Cordelia’s desk as she was endorsing a check from one of the zombie rescue-ees from the previous week. She was also able to identify the “awkward little red-head” Gunn met when he was trying to find Fred in her room. He had knocked on the door and it was opened, not by Fred, but by a nervous-looking red-haired, pajama-ed girl who shyly admitted that she wasn’t allowed to have boys in her room. “That’s our Willow….” Cordy had said.

Smells were perhaps the most interesting parts of Angel’s memory to come across, because they were all smells as Angel smelled them. The first time it happened, Wesley excitedly pointed out that they were probably the only humans to, even temporarily, have a vampiric sense of smell. Fred was the first to realize that a not particularly pleasant smell had a hint of what smelled to humans like a fresh-baked, homemade cherry pie. “So that’s what Angel smells when he smells human food?” Gunn had asked. “No wonder he doesn’t eat.” Wesley, on the other hand, was the first to identify fresh human blood. All of them were varying degrees of disgusted at the fact that it actually smelled quite appetizing. This one seemed to be the most frequent, so while smells might have been the most interesting memory fragments, they were not the most welcome. Angel was with Wesley when it happened one evening and he explained, on Wesley’s eager persistence, which parts of the scent told him gender, hair color, and the like.

Fascinated though Wesley was, he was also most persistent in pushing everyone to help find the cause of the problem. Though they all helped, no one, Cordy and Gunn in particular, seemed as eager as Wesley to search his countless volumes. “It’s like herding cats…” he muttered to himself every time someone got up for an unnecessary trip to the bathroom or for “a few seconds’” fresh air in the garden.  Angel was almost always somewhere upstairs, where he wouldn't have to explain or apologize for anything the rest of them might see, and so Wesley often found himself working alone.

And alone he was one evening when Wesley sighed and stopped in the middle of a paragraph to rub his eyes. If he could persuade the others to show a bit more focus, they might have found something by now. He could be _doing_ something rather than sitting there for hours, leafing through book after fruitless book. Not that he didn't enjoy research and the knowledge one inevitable gained almost by osmosis—he did enjoy it quite a bit—but stress and fatigue never added to the enjoyment of anything. Even Wesley had no idea what they were looking for: spell, banishment, even an anti-hallucinating potion would suffice for now.

“A professional couldn't have helped me,” Angel said. Wesley looked up. Angel sat down on a coffee table that was not supposed to be in the office. “Pardon?” Wesley asked. “It stopped when I got my soul back. My human heart.” Angel was looking at something somewhere on the floor near Wesley’s desk. Chains rattled. “Goody for you. Look, if we're gonna party, let's get on with it. Otherwise, could you let me out of these things?”  Wesley started at Faith’s voice. He stood up and circled the desk. Faith knelt on the ground, holding out her chained hands in plea to be set free.  “Faith, you have a choice. You've tasted something few ever do.” Angel stood up and began to pace. “I mean, to kill without remorse is to feel like a god.”  Faith yanked angrily against her chains, as though more to rip the thought out of her mind that Angel was right than to rip the chains from the walls. Maybe if she pulled hard enough it would work; or at least drown Angel out with the noise. “Right now, all I feel is a cramp in my wrist, so let me _go_!” 

Angel stopped a few inches from Faith and knelt down to her level. “But you're not a god,” he said. “You're not much more than a child.”

What was it that kept that rage so quiet? The anger was pure and white-hot, but perhaps it was the presence of a true superior that kept it waiting under the surface. 

“Going down this path will ruin you,” Angel said. “You can't imagine the price for true evil.” 

Faith’s attention snapped back up. “Yeah?” She sneered with the practice of a self-assured teenager leaning in with all the sass she could muster, “I hope evil takes MasterCard.”

Angel smiled, though Wesley was sure he wouldn’t have thought it funny, and stood. “You and me, Faith, we're a lot alike.” Angel sat down next to Faith against the wall, within the range of Faith’s chains. Though perhaps she couldn’t easily kill Angel in her restraints, she didn’t even seem inclined to try. Faith sank to the floor in temporary resignation and leaned against the wall, too. She fiddled with her rings, feigning boredom, though she was clearly listening.

“…I found out that there are other types of people,” Angel said. “People who genuinely wanted to do right. And they make mistakes. And they fall down. “Angel paused. Faith looked up briefly. She shifted slightly.

“You know, but they keep caring. Keep trying.” Angel glanced over at her. “If you can trust us, Faith, this can all change.” Faith’s eyes flicked up at Angel again for the briefest of seconds before hiding in the silver on her hands that she had probably stolen not long before. “You don't have to disappear into the darkness.” 

A door banged open. The noise shocked Wesley back to the present, and he stumbled out of the way of his memory self. He turned so he wouldn’t have to watch and gripped the bookshelf behind him to remain steady. Angel groaned under each  _thwack_ . Chains rattled. A lock clicked. The handcuffs snapped shut. 

“What?” 

Wesley saw Faith’s face again through his own memory. That wasn’t just confusion in her voice. 

“By the order of the Watcher's Council of Britain,” he heard himself say as he and the others pulled Faith away, “I am exercising my authority and removing you to England, where you will accept the judgment of the disciplinary committee…” 

“What did you do to him?” Faith’s voice sounded distant as the memory faded, and Wesley realized that she actually hadn’t been curious to see how just a few men had bested Angel and swept her away, like he had arrogantly thought. The memory ended. 

Wesley took a deep breath, trying to exhale as smoothly as he could. The dust on the shelf felt chalky on his fingers. It was pure irony, really. That this spell, or whatever it was, would choose this of hundreds of years’ worth of memories to play. Perhaps there was someone up there after all, manipulating their lives; though whether it was good or evil, he still couldn’t tell. 

“Wesley?” 

Wesley started at the noise of voice and movement behind him as Angel stood up. He had forgotten that the present-day Angel was there and had not disappeared with the rest of the scene. He turned around composedly. 

“I—” Angel said after a moment. “I just came down to see how you were doing.” 

”Fine.” Wesley said immediately. “Though I am a bit tired. I was just about to leave for the night, actually.” As if to prove it, Wesley walked over to his desk and began purposefully filling his briefcase with random sheets of notes. “Thank you for your concern.” 

Angel nodded, but didn’t move. He watched Wesley stow the notes without actually seeing them. 

Wesley knew he wouldn’t look at them before tomorrow, but the longer he kept his hands busy, the longer he had time to compose himself before taking his leave with a straight back and a high chin. A part of him felt deeply grateful for Angel’s silence. He knew that he could go home without Angel commenting on the memory. They wouldn’t have to have any conversation at all; maybe because Angel understood, or maybe because neither of them had anything constructive to say.  

“Angel.” Angel stirred to show he was listening while Wesley hesitated, unsure why his mouth was acting outside if his mind’s permission. Hadn’t he just decided that he didn’t have to have this possibly awkward conversation? But some, possibly sadistic, part of him wanted to know. Wesley looked down at his notes again before speaking. “How much more time, do you think? Before you would have gotten through to her? If I hadn’t…?” 

“We’ll never know,” Angel replied immediately and Wesley looked up. “But we got to her eventually.” 

“Yes…” Wesley didn’t need to add the clause about the damage she’d done in the meantime. “Yes, I suppose you did.” 

Then Wesley picked up his briefcase and the book he had been reading, and left the office through the doorway that Angel was not blocking.

~~~~

The memories continued to come, and with increasing intensity. The office soon reached its typical state of chaos when their books refused to reveal answers; and as only Wesley understood the method to the clutter of piles and notes, no one dared to touch them. Instead, Wesley acted as a librarian of sorts, taking the books that the rest were finished with and distributing new ones.

Angel still did not appear much, especially since he had become prone to engaging in past memories unexpectedly. Whoever was around during such moments would usually bring him out of it with a touch or saying his name loudly, but the fact the he lost control at all and was acting out his past self—his very private past self —gave Angel little incentive to be with the others at all. And so Angel would appear only to refresh his stack of books to flip through or inquire to Wesley about something he found. Even such short appearances were not safe, however. One time Angel came down to ask Wesley about a possibly hopeful she-demon that he found in one of the books. Noticing Cordelia, Gunn, and Fred all in the office with Wesley, he hesitated, wondering if he was about to be goaded by something one of them found lying around, like a corset. He wasn’t sure he could appropriately handle the immaturity of it all right then; but he went up to the open door anyway in time to catch the end of a short but fervent rant from Wesley.

“..and it’s not ghosts, phantoms, spirits of any kind, demons, or The First. One would _think_ that would rule out quite a number of options,” Wesley sighed and collapsed into his chair in frustration, “but of course it doesn’t, because it could be any one of _thousands_ of curses, hexes, or spells…” He wiped his glasses.

“What’s the difference between curses, hexes, and spells, anyway?” Fred asked from the chair across from him, “I mean, aren’t they all kind of the same?”

“It has to do with the intensity of the spell,” Angel said. Addressing Wesley with a cautiousness so subtle only Wesley noticed it, and holding up his books, he asked, “Where do you want these?”

“On the chair is fine,” Wesley said as Angel set them down. “And yes,” he agreed, rubbing his forehead and glancing down at the sprawl of papers on his desk. “Curses are stronger and more malevolent than hexes, which are generally used for petty vengeance purposes.”

Fred started a little when Angel picked up her hair, running it through his fingers. Cordy and Gunn stared curiously at him, but Wesley, hand still over his eyes, hadn’t noticed. He continued,

“Spells can be either malevolent or benevolent, depending on which one you use, and for which purpose. Charms, on the other hand, are opposite of hexes in that…” Wesley stopped, having taken his hand away and noticed what Angel was doing with Fred’s hair. “They, um…are benign, yet…small…”

Angel’s fingers worked expertly, twisting, draping, and pulling. He drew pins out of nowhere, sliding them smoothly into place as he worked, and suddenly they understood. Cordy put a finger to her lips to quiet Wesley, though he had no intention of breaking this memory. They were all too fascinated.

Finally, Angel finished. When Fred turned, Wesley’s breath caught. Her hair was swept up in the most elaborate, elegant bun he had ever seen. A few tresses fell intentionally down her long neck, and the rest curled up and wove through each other like wind made visible and frozen in time.

“Here,” Cordy whispered, quietly pulling a compact mirror out of her purse and handing it to Fred. Angel rested his hands on Fred’s shoulders and bent close to her ear as she opened the mirror to look at herself.

“All done, Love,” he whispered. “You look perfect, as usual.”

Fred grinned in delight when she saw herself. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “It’s so pretty!”

The cry jolted Angel out of the memory. He stood up and backed away, disoriented, as Fred let out an “Oh…” of disappointment at her collapsing hairstyle, no longer supported by the imaginary pins.

“What…” Angel said, and then realized what had happened. “Oh……Oh.”

“That was so neat!” Fred said, turning around in her chair.

“Since when do you know a thing about doing hair, Angel?” Cordy asked, arms crossed in curious interrogation.

“Yeah, man, you could go work for a salon or something. I hear Miss Ruly Curls is hiring,” Gunn snickered. Angel glared at him.

“It’s…” Angel tried to nonchalantly shrug it off. “I mean, vampires don’t have reflections, so Darla couldn’t do it herself…”

“Oh,” Cordy said. “That actually makes sense. It would explain her complete lack of a hairstyle now…”

“So does that mean you did her makeup, too?” Fred asked.

Angel straightened uncomfortably, decidedly not looking at the glee, amusement, and humor on the group’s faces. “Well,” he choked. “I don’t really see how that’s relevant.”

“Oh-ho!” Gunn said, “Bad-ass Angel wasn’t so bad-ass after all!”

“I hope you used eyeliner on her,” Cordy said, “‘Cause I hate to say it, but without it, there’s just not much going for her.”

Angel swallowed, “If you must know,” he said, “I preferred eye shadow because…” he took a deep breath, “because with just a light stroke I could also highlight the arch of her eyebrows.”

Cordy’s own eyebrows disappeared beneath her bangs. “Good for you,” she said, though by that time Angel had already shuffled out of the room and she guessed that with his vampire speed hastened by embarrassment, he was probably already long out of hearing range.

~~~~

Gunn’s head throbbed.   
  
It had only been a few days since they had all started seeing Angel’s memories, but with the heavy research mode Wesley had out them all in, it felt like at least a week. Why was Wesley in charge, again?

Not long ago, Gunn had been pleasantly dozing with his head resting in his hand when Wesley had called his name suddenly from the other room. Gunn jerked awake and his head slipped from his hand, banging unpleasantly on the table.   
  
Apparently, Wesley wanted the book that Gunn was “reading” to check some reference or another. Gunn was more than happy to oblige. He slid from his chair, dragging the book from the counter and made his way to Wesley’s office, rubbing the side of his head as he went. As he passed Cordelia she offhandedly muttered, “Graceful,” and smirked into her own heavy book, turning one of the pages with the same light flip that she used for turning pages of fashion magazines.   
  
He tossed the book in to Wesley, who fumbled it for a bit, then caught it with an indignant shout.

“Gunn, do you have any idea how old this book is?”

Gunn shared a smile with Cordelia while Wesley proceeded to describe the virtues of a book Gunn was sure ought to have been burned in the 1700s.   
  
“I’m going to check on Angel,” he announced loud enough to be heard over Wesley’s continuing monologue. This was code for going upstairs and opening Angel’s door just long enough to check if he was experiencing another embarrassing memory before continuing down the hall to the nearest empty room with a bed and taking a nap.   
  
“Take him some blood.” Cordelia said at Gunn’s retreating back. “He hasn’t eaten all day.”   
  
“The way that stuff smells I don’t blame him.” Gunn replied, but headed into the kitchen anyway. In addition to becoming familiar with Angel’s perspective concerning the scent of human blood, the gang had also had the unpleasant experience of what Angel’s newer diet smelled like. Gunn had to admit that he was impressed that Angel could eat something that unappealing every day.   
  
Appetizing or not, Gunn slowly mounted the stairs of the Hyperion, mug in hand. He paused for a moment to inspect the message “Was it good for you too?” that was scrawled in blood across the wall. He shuddered involuntarily and continued on, wondering if it would be better or worse if he knew its significance.   
  
Gunn turned left at the top of the stairs. Truth be told, he doubted it would be any less disturbing either way. Although he had joined in with the others in making light of Angel’s misfortunes, Gunn was finding it hard not to study the faces of the countless bodies that appeared and wonder about their lives. Did they have friends they laughed with? Family they ate dinner with? Faithful lovers? Older brothers who failed to save them?   
  
Gunn stopped in the middle of the hallway and closed his eyes against his own unwelcome memory. Now was not the time to think about Alana.

He continued on.

Gunn arrived at Angel’s door and rapped twice before pushing it open, swallowing his last several thoughts.   
  
“Hey, Angel, you aren’t getting beat up by power walkers again are you?” Gunn had to admit that the replay of that particular memory had almost made him grateful for the entire experience. Almost.

“Cordy says you should eat this.” Gunn waved the mug towards the dark corner that Angel had been inhabiting of late. “And I think you should drink it this time, or at least wash it down the drain, ‘cause she’s…” Gunn trailed off. Angel wasn’t in the chair in the corner surrounded by books, or in the room at all for that matter. But something else was. He flicked on the light. A pale, dark-haired girl—Drusilla, Gunn remembered—stood elegantly in the middle of the room, surveying the ground around her with a pleased and satisfied smile. She looked like a leading actress in a solo spotlight on stage, right at the part of the performance where the audience tosses roses and bouquets to her for her exquisite talent. Only it wasn’t flowers that were strewn about her feet.

Dozens of bodies lay casually, grotesquely, amongst each other. Necks bitten and snapped, arms and legs ripped out of joints, fingers and fingernails twisted off, eyes pressed into jelly, rose-red blood everywhere. The mug in Gunn’s hand splattered to the ground. Drusilla glanced up. It looked as though the stage makeup artist had spilled the red paint they used for her lips and smeared it down her chin.

“Would you like some, Daddy?” she asked. As though showing her prize bouquet from her most adoring fan, she held out the little boy in her arms, careful not to damage the white skin as soft as petals. His head rolled over on her arm, hair swishing limply like flowers that had gone a little too long without water, and his eyes were the bright color of bluebells.

“It’s still fresh.”

Gunn almost didn’t make it to the bathroom.


	6. Chapter 6

The memories weren’t funny anymore.

Gunn didn’t return to the hotel until the following day, and refused to answer when anyone asked him what was wrong. Wesley tried his best to ignore the various embarrassing memories of himself from Sunnydale, and Cordy swore that if someone didn’t put an end to the 80’s music that hovered around her desk for two hours one day, she would stake Angel herself just to make it stop. And Fred got hurt.

Apparently, the memories had progressed to a very corporeal stage. While objects had been solid before, people and creatures had not. That’s why Fred was unfazed by the giant hairy demon with 12-inch claws when she passed it in the hall—until it swiped at her arm and made a neat slice through her shirt and several layers of skin.

Fred was fine, of course, but now they all had something new to worry about. Not only could the memories touch them, but the effects were very real and very permanent.

As she was searching the internet one evening, Cordelia realized with a lurch in her stomach that if the memories were this real and lasting to them, how much more were they to Angel? He had always experienced the memories to a stronger degree than they did—how was he experiencing them now? After a moment’s thought, she pushed herself up from her desk and entered Wesley’s office to present her concern, ignoring a voice emitting from near the counter that said, “That guy gives me the heebie jeebies.”

“Yes, I’ve thought of that, as well,” Wesley said once she’d finished, wiping his glasses. “Angel hasn’t indicated any recent changes, and I’ve asked him to come to me if anything new or surprising happens.”

“Did you define ‘surprising’? ‘Cause you know, it can be translated pretty loosely.” There was a sudden explosion out in the lobby and neither of them flinched.

“Yes, well…” Wesley started.                                                                                        

“Wesley, what if Buffy kills him again?” Cordy’s eyes widened in horror. “Oh God…what if Buffy _sleeps_ with him again!”

“I realize these are concerns, Cordelia, which is why I’ve been so persistently urging you all to keep focus-”

“Hey guys,” Gunn poked his head into the room, coughing slightly from the dust caused by the explosion, “Fred and I are going to get ice cream. Wanna come?” Wesley gave Gunn an exasperated look. “Ok, I’ll take that as a ‘no.’ Cordy?”

Cordelia shook her head. “There’s a nasty smell hanging around my desk. Anything that goes down might come right back up at this point.” Gunn shrugged and left, leaving them with a, “See y’all later, then.” Wesley sighed.

“I think I might take off, as well. There are some occult stores on the way home I would like to stop by to see if I can find anything. Are you alright by yourself?”

Cordy waved his concerns aside. “Please, Wesley. It’s just Angel’s memories.”

“But Fred-”

“I’ll keep a weapon at my desk if it makes you feel better. Besides, Angel has vampire hearing, remember? I’ll let out a blood-curdling scream, and he’ll come running.”

Satisfied, Wesley nodded. “See you tomorrow, then.”

“See you tomorrow.”

Wesley had to hop two stones across a wide, babbling brook to get to the office door.

~~~~

The expansive view from the balcony of their Spanish villa, the full moon reflecting on the waters of the ocean and lighting up a small seaside town in the valley below, faded from view. The lounge chair Angelus had been relaxing in morphed into Angel’s favorite armchair in his room at the Hyperion. A book sat in his lap. Memories from the 100+ years since that night came flooding back and Angel felt the soul inside him again, painful and heavy. Shaking himself slightly from the disorientation, Angel glanced down at the book to pick up where he left off. Minor gods. Right.

Angel hated coming out of the memories. It was bizarre to be experiencing something as if for the first time, only to be jolted forward—usually several decades forward—and realize that you had already lived it. To make it worse, every time he came out of an Angelus memory, it was like getting a soul all over again.  It was rough enough the first (and second) time, but now Angel felt the effects several times a day with the ending of each Angelus-era memory. Angel tried to concentrate on his book.

He read a few paragraphs before the cackling of a fire distracted him. Someone had lit a fire in the fireplace in front of him. Angel didn’t have a fireplace. He shifted and tried to ignore it, but another movement made him look up again. Angel’s sister, six years old, by the look of it, was playing with a wooden Noah’s Ark set on the rug. The smell of a roasting goose and freshly baked bread wafted into the room. Real food hadn’t smelled that good in a long time. Angel stared as his floor turned from carpet to hardwood. To see if he could, Angel tried to stop it. Nothing happened. Of course, and Angel only barely admitted to even himself, it had been a half-hearted attempt. The fire felt nice and he enjoyed smelling Christmas dinner being cooked. And coming out of this memory wouldn’t be quite as unpleasant. Not fun, but better than others.

Angel looked back down at his book as his armchair turned into a wooden rocking chair. He just had time to register a picture of a slightly familiar-looking statue before-

“Liam?” Angel looked up. “Come play with me?” Angel hesitated. His windows were frosty with snow. “Please?” Kathy smiled at him.

“Alright, then.” Liam slid off his chair, setting the slate and chalk he used to practice his letters carefully on the table beside him—Father would be furious if it broke.

~~~~

It took all of Cordelia’s concentration to tune out yet another recitation of one of Spike’s poems. It didn’t help that she was fairly sure that the book she was looking through was not going to help find a cure for Angel. But it was the only thing to do when one was all alone, waiting for the customers who _weren’t_ calling, and in lieu of a magazine that was currently sitting forgotten at home. Spike soon finished his poem, but almost immediately the music from a 1940’s swing band blasted from somewhere in the lobby. At the same time, a horse and rider trotted past the counter, and something glass smashed somewhere Wesley’s office. Reaching for another volume, she plugged her ears and tried to focus. She should have said yes to Gunn’s offer for ice cream. She wasn’t at all hungry, and she was still queasy from the smell that had finally dissipated, but at least she would have gotten out of the hotel for a bit.

“Excuse me,” a young boy dressed in 19th century apparel stood on the other side of Cordy’s desk, “Could you tell me where—” A look of terror came over the boy, and he ran out screaming. Cordelia automatically glanced up toward Angel’s room. The band still blasted, Xander wandered by on the second floor hall that overlooked the lobby.

Cordelia sighed with frustration and glanced back down at her pile of books, frowning slightly. The books didn’t seem to be helping at all. They had combed through volume after volume, Fred had searched in vain for any hint of hallucinogenic properties in the Numar mucus (pointing out that no one else was seeing things from their own pasts and they had all come in contact with it in some form or another), and Cordelia had spent hours on the internet, but without any inkling of what she should search for, had no luck. It was worth a shot talking to Angel again, she decided. And she wouldn’t have to stare at old books for a while, which was a plus.

~~~~

Angel’s door was open when Cordelia reached it, which struck her as slightly odd. These days, Angel liked to stay firmly locked behind it. She peered inside. Angel stood in the middle of the room, his back to the door. His posture seemed almost weary. Of course, Cordy thought, a trip through Angel’s past had to be rough. Sure, he relived it in his mind everyday while he sat up here brooding— _not_ socializing like a normal person—but to literally relive it like you were actually there, well…  _Our lives have got to get less literal_.

“What do you want, Darla?” he asked.

“ _Not_ Darla, Angel,” Cordelia sighed.

“You want this?” Angel held up something in his right hand. It was a plain metal ring. He tossed it on the ground and stood as if waiting for something.

“Ok, Big Guy,” she said, clapping her hands together as she approached him, “time to wake up.” She stretched out a hand to touch his shoulder.

 “Or maybe what you really want is this,” Angel’s hand lashed out and clamped on her wrist like a manacle. She gasped in shock as he whipped her around, yanking the breath out of her, and suddenly the wall slammed into her back.

“Ow!” Cordy’s entire back prickled and she gasped in air to soothe it. She pushed against Angel, but he only stepped closer; his broad shoulders and dark clothes threw a shadow over her. She looked up at his face. His eyes were…wrong. Empty.

Queen C mode kicked in. She could deal with this. She seized the tiny flame of anger inside her.

“Angel, I swear,” she said as she pushed against him with all her strength. “If you don’t wake up soon, I’m gonna—”

“And maybe…” Angel continued softly, nearly brushing her face with his nose. “…What you really want…” Angel’s breath was cold, “…is this.” One of his hands held her jaw while the other gripped a little too hard at her neck. She could smell his hair gel and the earthy, somewhat salty scent of skin and dried sweat, very much lacking in the heat of a normal person. She had no idea that heat had a smell.

“Angel,” she tried again. Why wasn’t he waking up? The flame of anger flickered in the waters of fear that welled inside her. Any second now he would stop. Angel brushed Cordy’s hair away from her face.

“Angel, stop!” She surprised herself at the note of panic in her voice. She was in control… She was in control. Angel gently touched the tip of his tongue to a spot just beside her lips. He kissed the spot. And then he kissed her mouth.

No. Big no. No kissing. She pushed against him, but he kissed her again, and again; repeatedly, hurriedly, forcefully. Her stomach twisted nauseatingly as he made her mouth— _her mouth_ —his own. Where was her anger? She needed it— _really_ needed it. _Think, Cor_. _Self defense, not really a foreign concept in your line of work._

She should knee him.

Wrong angle.

She should punch him.

He was too close.

Her mind clouded. Angel’s body trapped her against the wall and claustrophobia crept in.

“No!” Cordelia gave a hopeless last shove against Angel. Angel stumbled back, and Cordy, surprised, took the moment to catch her breath, wiping her mouth and stumbling away from the wall by instinct.

“I’m not playing.” Angel warned, following her eyes as she moved. Cordy’s pounding heart skipped a beat. It hurt.

“What do you mean? Angel, _tell me_ you’re in a mem—”

“I just wanna feel something besides the cold.” Angel stared at her for a long second, then before she even knew he’d moved, he shoved her backwards by the neck. Coughing, Cordy crashed into Angel’s desk, scattering whatever was on it and throwing it to the ground as Angel moved in on top of her. The room darkened as he forced her backwards and a fresh surge of panic rushed through her, painfully bitter on her tongue. Part of Cordelia hoped vindictively that Angel could taste it as she choked in his mouth.

A tear prickled at the corner of her eye. No. She was not going to lose it. This is Angel. (This is Angel?). _Angel_. He would never… Angel pulled at her bottom lip and moaned quietly. A shiver went through her core—and not the pleasant kind. Stars blinked across her eyes from the non-existent air her panicked lungs furiously tried to pull in under the weight of Angel’s body.

Angel’s hand brushed down her torso.

She should yell for help. _And who would hear you, Cordy?_ No one. She’d sent away her only help. They’re out eating ice cream, and she could be, too, if… _If only I hadn’t put so much damn trust in a vampire who occasionally has a tendency to, oh, go evil._ Why, _why_ would she do that?

Because she felt safer with Angel—yes, even a hallucinating Angel—than she did with…anyone. Including the Slayer. Buffy would have protected her out of duty. Angel would have protected her because…because she was Cordelia. Angel’s hand came back up her torso and his mouth forced her to bite her own lip. Maybe it was her oxygen-deprived brain, but she had to laugh at the irony.

He left suddenly. She pushed herself up and tried to focus, dizzy and breathing so hard the air stabbed at her lungs. He stood several feet away, his eyes narrowed angrily.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked. Looking around desperately, she grabbed at the first weapon-like object on the desk. It was a letter opener. It would do. She pointed it Angel like a street fighter, the cold, hard metal feeling more comforting in her hand than it probably should have.

“Laughing?” Cordelia circled him, stumbling over her feet. She’d left the door open. She could…… _not_ outrun a vampire.

Her voice shook, “You stay the _hell_ away from me, Angel.”

Angel’s eyes lashed out a pure, terrifying animal anger and she started in shock. And then his arm—when did he get right in front of her again?—slammed into her body. As if in slow motion, Cordy watched the room fly by her. And then she hit the double french doors leading to his bedroom. The glass shattered high-pitched and painful in her ears; several pieces of glass bit into her skin as she landed and slid across the floor. She cried out from the sharpness of the glass and the bluntness of the hard wood.

The letter opener was gone. Cordelia hesitantly looked up through blurry eyes. When had she started to cry? Why was her fear so much more powerful than her anger? That had never happened before.

Angel somehow looked a hundred times taller from the floor. He stalked toward her like a predator, fluidly, confidently, each step decided before he even made it. His shoulders were loose, as though he didn’t care what she tried to do next—he would win. Angel‘s eyes for once not did not reflect anything she recognized; nothing about her, nothing about their surroundings to tell her that some part of him cared about _something_.

“Don’t you feel the cold?” he asked. His shoes crunched on the broken glass. Was that tears or blood on her face?

Angel stopped in front of her. He yanked her painfully to her feet with one hand and gripped her neck with the other. She tried to struggle, biting her lip to fight back sobs.

“Angel, please.”

Angel looked into her eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“What?” she asked, trying to stall more than she really wanted to know. Angel didn’t answer right away. He glanced over her face before meeting her eyes again.

“None of it matters.” There was a moment that seemed to last forever as he stared at her through the tears, blood, and mascara (she should have chosen the waterproof kind), that ran together in her eyes. Then he kissed her again, pressing hard and uncomfortably against her teeth. She sobbed in a breath as she tried with less and less fervor to break away.

“No,” she pleaded.

His lips slid down to her neck. Cordy swallowed hard. Didn’t vampires bite during…at times like this? She couldn’t see his face anymore, but she felt it change. It had never really scared her before; at least, not since Sunnydale. Another sob escaped. “Angel, please,” she tried again. His sharp teeth brushed against her collarbone and she shivered.

 _Come on, Buffy. It’s time for your last-minute, overly-dramatic Supergirl-to-the-rescue, pun-at-the-ready entrance._ She felt it, like a pin prick. Angel’s tongue licked the spot and she screwed her face against it. Then suddenly, he stopped.

~~~~

Relief flooded Angel. It would all be over soon. More than a century of torture: it would all be over. He could go back to not caring and he and Darla would travel their world together again. He would finally be happy.

He hadn’t even realized his face changed. It was so natural. For once, he let his demonic instincts take over. He pricked Darla’s collarbone—she liked the tease. He tasted the blood. Smooth, sweet. And oddly hot. What was that tang he tasted? _Darla’s blood doesn’t taste like that_. He shook himself mentally.

Then he remembered. That night with Darla was months ago. But then…

As though all his senses came back in one fell swoop, the scent of terror overwhelmed him, a heart pounded unfamiliarly against his chest like lightning strikes, and the heat from the body he held so close surged into him. He pulled back, his face normal again, and met Cordelia’s eyes.

“Oh God,” was all he could say.

Angel dropped his hands and stumbled back over the glass on the floor, away from her. Shame ripped through him, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. “Oh God, Cordy, I’m-” But he couldn’t even say it. He knew “sorry” wasn’t going to be enough for either of them. He saw the memory in his mind. He remembered what he’d done to Darla, only now when the memory flashed before his eyes it was Cordy in her place. Horror stabbed at him as each word and each touch played itself out. Then he realized what had happened with Darla only moments later, and it was almost more than he could take. He stumbled back again and hit the wall behind him. He was as far as he could get from her. He wanted to close his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at her and cover his ears so he wouldn’t have to hear her. Every part of his being wanted to shrink away and protect itself from all the senses Angel possessed that told him that she was there—that she was hurt, scared, and almost the newest addition to his list of victims—but something forced him to stand there in penance and wait. It seemed to take forever for Cordelia to do something, though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. Cordy brushed her fingers under her eyes. Her breathing was shaky and uneven, and she did not speak until she regained control of herself. A small part of Angel was impressed with how fast she did it.

She straightened up and swiveled toward him so fast that Angel jumped. “Angel,” she said in a tone icy enough to send shivers up Angel’s spine, “was that a memory?”

Angel swallowed and nodded.

Cordelia took a calming breath. “I need to leave right now. But I _will_ be back and we _are_ going to talk about it. _All_ of it.”

Angel nodded. Cordelia walked past him with all the composure she could muster, ignoring the crunching shards of broken glass under her feet. When she was gone, Angel let the breaths come in dry sobs. He didn’t need the air, but the emotions still came with the same physical reactions, dead or not. He finally closed his eyes against the glass on the floor and felt a tear begin to form. He screwed his eyes tight against it.

After several more steadying breaths, he stumbled toward the shower to wash Cordelia’s overwhelming scent off of him.


	7. Chapter 7

It took a long while for Cordy to regain control in the downstairs bathroom of the Hyperion. When she did, she stood up, washed her face at the sink, and stared at her reflection. She looked terrible. At least she didn’t look as bad as she felt— _that_ would have been scary. Like, Marilyn Manson scary.

Though her hands still trembled, she pulled out the first aid kit from under the sink and focused on pulling out what glass she could, now that her eyes had dried enough to see. It frustrated her that she was so shaken; pure anger would have been a _much_ more useful emotion. And it would have made her feel…stronger… _not_ a victim. Cordelia gave a slight shudder. She hated the word _victim_ anyway, but she could never stand it in any context related to herself. Anger got rid of _victim_ far more effectively than terror, which was still lingering.

Several minutes later, she looked up again. Some of her normal color had come back. Though her breathing had finally returned to normal and her heart rate had slowed to a healthy pace, she was clumsy with adrenaline and the memory was still raw in her mind.

She would deal with it tomorrow. She closed the first aid kit and put it away. Deciding she was presentable (and able) enough to drive home, she left the bathroom, grabbed her purse and Angel’s keys from the counter, and entered the lobby.

She gave a small, startled gasp when she looked up to see Angel standing near the staircase, staring somewhere at the floor.  She clutched her purse, which concealed a stake, a little harder.

“What do you want, Angel?” she asked, glad to finally feel some anger brewing.

Angel looked up to meet her eyes, and Cordelia jumped a little at the distance-contact. “I want you to take Fred with you tonight,” he told her. “It’s not safe here.”

The anger began to boil. “Damn right it’s not!” A small part of her noted with satisfaction the stinging effect of her words. “How long has it been since you can’t wake up? When were you going to let us in on this, Angel? After you start hurting the people who are trying to help you? The people who care about you? Angel, you could have-” But she stopped, not wanting to finish the sentence.

“I know,” Angel said quietly. Then he amended, “I-I mean I didn’t know. Not really.” The furious look from Cordelia compelled Angel to explain faster. “The memories are becoming more frequent, but I didn’t know it would take so much to bring me out of them.” He lowered his shaking voice, his expression both completely sincere and fearful. “I swear, Cordy, if I knew I would hurt you like that…”

Cordelia sighed and put a hand to her forehead, rubbing it. “Look, we’ll talk about this tomorrow, ok?” Cordelia crossed her arms again, taking a deep breath and looking up. “I’ll wait for Fred, but-” She didn’t have to wait. Fred and Gunn returned from their (rather long, Cordelia noticed) ice cream break. They seemed to have had a good time and were laughing about something. They stopped when they noticed the looks on Cordy and Angel’s faces.

“What’s wrong?” Gunn asked immediately. Neither of them answered for a moment. Cordelia broke the silence.

“Fred, pack an overnight bag, ok? You’re coming with me tonight.”

“Why?” Fred’s confused face looked from Cordy to Angel and back again. There was a brief pause before,

“I don’t wake up from the memories as easily as I used to.” Angel said, not looking at anyone. “It’s not safe for you to be here.” A stunned silence followed.

“O-ok.” Fred said at last. “I’ll go pack a few things. We’re coming back tomorrow, right?” she asked Cordelia, who nodded.

“Oh yeah.” Her tone was firm and cold. Fred stumbled up the stairs to her room. The silence that followed her departure was tense and awkward, to say the least. Angel and Cordelia found separate spots on the floor to stare at, while Gunn studied them both, trying to piece together what had happened. The seconds that ticked by were almost audible in the complete silence. At last, Fred returned, carrying a bag over her shoulder.

“Let’s go,” Cordelia told Fred, ascending the steps to the door. “I’m taking your car, Angel.” Angel nodded, not looking up as the door closed behind them. Gunn had stayed behind.

“Is she ok?” Gunn asked Angel. There was a pause. Angel raised his eyes.

“Physically.”

Gunn nodded. “Yeah, man. Whatever.”

And Gunn left, too, leaving Angel to lock the door behind him.

~~~~

Gunn wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take.

Not that teasing Angel hadn’t been fun, nor that Fred’s delight every time she discovered a new antique laying around wasn’t at times downright adorable, but Gunn had stumbled over too many memories—literally and figuratively—that reminded Gunn horribly of the pure monster inside Angel to still be okay with the fact that he worked with him.  The questions that Rondell and his crew had brought up still bothered him. Admitting that Angel had the mission was like allying with a reformed Nazi general in Gunn’s book, and Rondell’s confusion mirrored his own. The image of the vampire in her sea of bodies kept repeating in his mind, every day reminding Gunn of the very worst the Angel is—maybe even worse than the one that killed Alana. Gunn was getting good at shutting down his emotions around the others, but he was tired of pretending that everything was alright, especially now that that something happened to Cordy—something so bad even _she_ won’t talk about it. Gunn couldn’t remember the last time that happened; if it happened at all.

So Gunn can up with a plan: to not deal. Not yet, anyway. He needed time away from the hotel. Time to think. Time to process. That’s why he came to the Hyperion early that morning—earlier than even Wesley, judging by the fact that the door was unlocked. Angel deserved to hear it straight to his face why Gunn was taking some time off. Plus, he didn’t want to deal with Wesley thinking he was doing this just to get out of research. Gunn fully planned on taking some books home with him when he left.

A few memories played here and there like a television someone forgot to turn off as Gunn climbed the stairs to Angel’s room, half-listening to the phrases and songs and screams and laughter that wound their way through the halls. He even heard his own voice once saying something not important. In fact, he couldn’t even remember saying it. As he rounded the last corner to Angel’s room, Angel’s voice echoed from somewhere behind him and for once Gunn didn’t wonder at the context: he remembered it a little too perfectly.

“Hey Charles, let me make it easier for you… Take a look. This is what I am. Deal with it, or don’t. But make a damn choice.”

He wasn’t changing his choice. He was just…

Gunn stopped in the middle of the hall. Angel was standing outside the door to his room. A little girl in a long blue dress fell limp against his embrace. Judging by the way his face was buried at her neck, this was not a recent Good-Angel memory.  
  
Gunn watched as Angel sucked more of her life away, a flame of anger already burning well within him. The lacing on her dress was soft and intricate, and her dark curls fell smoothly down her shoulder. It was her face that stopped him from looking away. She wasn’t just in physical pain: she was helpless, betrayed, confused. It was the same look Alana had the day their mother didn’t come home. It had been her birthday. It took Gunn everything he had to make her smile again, and then she….  
  
The flames inside spread out from his gut and up through his arms, wrapping around his fingers and clenching them shut so hard they hurt with the hot energy.   
  
With surprising gentleness, Angel lowered the girl to the ground, leaning her against the doorway so that she remained in a slumped sitting position. He placed her hands delicately in her lap and leaned over to whisper something in her ear. Then Angel stood and took a step back into the hallway where he paused to admire his work. He looked down at the body with, to Gunn’s surprise, a look of sadness on his face.   
  
Gunn didn’t know how long they both stood there, curiosity took the place of some of Gunn’s anger as Angelus, the monster, looked down with the same expression Angel sometimes had when caught brooding alone in a room. Then the sadness was gone and a smile spread, slow and cruel across Angel’s face and he looked up, almost directly at Gunn and said with a tone of amusement,

“You’re right. Family blood is the sweetest.” Angel looked down at the body again and whispered just loud enough to be heard “It’s so strange, that I’d care so little about my dear sister’s death.”   
  
Before Gunn realized that he had moved his fist was slamming into Angel’s face.   
  
“You son of a _bitch_!” Gunn seethed. Angel slowly, shakily picked himself off of the floor. “Your sister! How could you do that to your sister?” Gunn was trembling again. He glared down at Angel, now on his knees but making no attempts to get any higher.   
  
Gunn wished he would so he could punch him again.  
  
“You had a sister. And you…” Gunn grasped for words. Angel just sat there, staring at the floor. The lack of response only fueled Gunn’s fury. Clenching his fists again he asked in an accusing voice, “Don’t you even care?”   
  
“Stop.” Angel’s voice was almost pleading with hints of his own anger lacing the edges.   
  
“No!” Gunn shouted back. He didn’t care that the pleading in Angel’s voice reached his eyes. He didn’t care that Angel looked like he was experiencing physical pain from his words. “Do you even remember her name, or have you forgotten over the years?” Gunn pointed a finger at the corpse still lying where Angel had placed it. “How long did it take before all you could remember was how good she tasted going down?”  
  
In an instant the pleading look was gone, the same rage that filled Gunn now reflected in Angel’s eyes. He lunged at Gunn, grabbed him, and slammed him against the wall with vampiric speed.   
  
Fear shot unbidden through Gunn as Angel pushed him up the wall and his feet left the floor. He shoved the fear down and struggled, but his efforts were weak. The wind had been almost knocked out of him when he hit the wall, and Angel was adding more and more weight onto his chest. “Get off!” Gunn put as much violence in the words as he could muster as he pushed uselessly against the vampire. Angel only pressed against his lungs harder, and Gunn couldn’t speak anymore. He could only watch as Angel’s eyes shifted to vampiric gold.   
  
Silence stretched on. Their faces were only inches apart now. Gunn wondered if he had gone too far, if Angel really was going to kill him. Something in the back of his head took that moment to remind him just how pleasant the smell of fear had been when he had smelled it with the others in the lobby.  
  
“Kathy.” Angel’s voice had lost none of its anger but his face looked slightly less demonic.

Gunn blinked. He tried to take a breath to voice his confusion but Angel was still putting his most of his weight against his chest.

Angel continued anyway. “Her name was Kathy…” He looked away as he said this and Gunn felt some of the pressure leave.

“And her favorite color was blue…”

Gunn’s feet hit the ground. Angel was staring at the carpet again.

“She was wonderful at stitching, she used to fix my…” Angel paused and gave his head a small shake before starting again. “She was awful in the kitchen though. Mother always said that she couldn’t peal a potato to save her life.” Angel gave a cold smile. “She used to sneak out at night to lay in the meadow and look at the stars. I never told her that I would follow her to make sure nothing happened.”

Angel took a step back, distancing himself from Gunn. “And she tasted…” Angel was almost whispering now. “…she tasted like honey and daisies.”   
  
Gunn was almost glad Angel had added the last part, so he could be disgusted. Gunn had never felt pity for Angel before, had never considered him as anything but a vampire, but there he was looking far more tired and weak and human than Gunn felt comfortable admitting. So when Angel mentioned honey and daisies Gunn jumped on the opportunity to bring the conversation back to familiar ground.  
  
“You killed her.” Yes, even saying it brought some of the anger back, and Angel was looking less vulnerable, more closed off, more normal. “You were happy about it.”

Angel was almost expressionless now, still staring at the floor now with his shoulders hunched like he was expecting to be hit. Gunn felt a pang of regret for continuing. A small voice told him that he had missed an opportunity that would never come again. A louder voice told him that it was Angel’s fault in the first place. “You…”  
  
But the pleading look on Angel’s face not ten minutes ago was making it hard for Gunn to maintain his anger.   
  
“How could…” Gunn trailed off again. Angel looked up at him, annoyed, like he had already explained once and he wasn’t going to again.   
  
They stared at each other in silence again.   
  
And in a moment Gunn saw it. Instead of unknown hands dragging his sister away he saw his own, but he remained just as helpless to stop it. He watched as his hand pushed the stake through her heart like she meant nothing because she was a vampire. At the same time he saw Angel drinking from Kathy because she was human.   
  
It left him feeling empty and cold. His eyes met Angel’s again and wondered if he was feeling the same way.   
  
More silence. It was getting awkward. Gunn was torn between apologizing and shouting, talking and punching, staying and running away. He shifted uncomfortably. Angel did too. Gunn almost smiled at this, wondering if Angel was also wondering if he could flee to his room and pretend like the whole thing hadn’t happened. And then, without even thinking about it he asked.  
  
“How can you stand it?”   
  
For a while it seemed that Angel wasn’t going to reply. Gunn wasn’t sure that he had expected him to anyway. He just looked at Gunn, closed and motionless. Gunn wondered if the question had been too much. After a long moment, Angel spoke.

“I…“ Angel shifted again and looked back at Kathy. Gunn leaned forward ever so slightly as if he was about to receive one of the long-guarded secrets of the world.   
  
“I-” Angel started again. “I brood.”   
  
Gunn let out a breath allowing his shoulders to slump and allowed himself a slight grin. He didn’t know what he had been expecting. If he had really believed that Angel held the truth to moving on and forgetting the past. “Yeah?” Gunn made a mock-scornful face. “How’s that workin’ out?”   
  
Angel glanced up at Gunn, somewhat indignant. “Well what about you? How do you deal with it?”  
  
Gunn also made a show of coming up with an answer before finally replying. “I attack unsuspecting vampires in the hallway.”   
  
Angel nodded and fell quiet - looking away from Gunn and back toward the little girl in the doorway. They both watched in silence as Kathy faded away.


	8. Chapter 8

Wesley wasn’t quite sure why he always came in so early. He used to blame years of the Watcher’s Academy’s strict disciplinary regulations—which many students complained were too disciplined even for Buddhist monks—for his early-to-bed-early-to-rise schedule, but he wasn’t quite sure that was a valid excuse anymore. He supposed with the early morning came a certain amount of peace and promise, even in a noisy, and for many hopeless, place like Los Angeles. Yes, that would make sense. The air is still cool when the sun has only just risen, and Wesley enjoyed walking through the Hyperion’s small garden to get to the door, as the smells for once overpowered the city smog. Wesley often left the door open the let the cool air circulate in the lobby, and Fred would always close it when she appeared downstairs, it being late enough in the day by then for the temperature to have risen just a little too much.

Wesley was a little late this morning, though. Having caught an interesting segment of news on TV, he indulged in an extra cup of tea and finished the piece. He had been in no real hurry anyway, as the hotel had been far less quiet and peaceful of late. Almost as if to prove him wrong he found the interior of the Hyperion oddly empty. He did have to jump the last stair to avoid a body in a World War II uniform, but once he closed the garden door behind him, he was almost alone save for a man in a giant hot dog suit waving fliers by the elevators. Wesley tried not to think about why this man was memorable and headed for his office.

The room was an absolute wreck. A layer of dust had settled from the explosion in the lobby the night before and there were water marks on the floor from the stream. It was nothing they couldn’t handle; putting all the books back on the shelves and filing the notes away would be the difficult part. It would all fall on Wesley in the end; he liked his books in a certain order and no one else could do it for him. He glanced around at the stacks of thick tomes and papers that covered all available surfaces like blankets. One of his greatest fears these days, aside from one of them getting hurt because of a memory, was that something from Angel’s past would rampage through the office and destroy the carefully organized mess.

Wesley set down the books that he had picked up the previous night in one of the few free spots left in the room. He chose the most hopeful one, sat down at his desk, double-checked that he had weaponry at the ready, and started to read.

The words were beautiful to him. The book was so old that it was handwritten, and the elaborate print glided across the page like an ice skater’s path. The throaty vowels and soft consonants of the language rolled in his mind, blocking out the singing that echoed through the Hyperion’s halls. The language was dead, like the demonic species that once spoke it, but he found a thrill that he could give it life again, even for just a little bit. He came across a particularly lovely word and leaned back as he paused to admire the sound. At the Watcher’s Academy, he used to read texts in foreign and ancient languages out loud, just to hear it. The other boys in his dorm thought that he was being pompous, proving that he had perfect pronunciation. It was partially true, of course, but when he became Prefect, and later Head Boy, Wesley would still sit in his single room and sound out the French, the Sanskrit, the Gocknery.

“Seulay-yah,” Wesley whispered. He really should be working. There was no time to dawdle; but new books always put him in a good mood, and the Yarrey language was one of his favorites. It had a beautiful rhythm that, in his opinion, was unrivaled by earth languages.

He was so engrossed by both the language and the comforting blanket of silence that the sudden eruption of a shouting match just feet away nearly caused him to fall out of his chair.

He only just managed to regain his balance when the chair disappeared entirely.

Rubbing his arm where it had hit the floor, he took a moment to appreciate that no one had been around to hear his rather undignified yelp before he had hit the thick carpet. Then he took another moment to realize that his chair was not the only thing in his office that had decided to take a leave of absence. His desk was gone, and also his books (he tried not to think about this too much). In fact, by the look of things, he was sitting on the floor at the foot of a bed in a lush hotel room from an earlier time (late 19th century?) and not in his office at all. Somehow, Wesley had been drawn into one of Angel’s memories—without the real Angel in the vicinity.

 _Well this can’t be good,_ he thought.

Wesley gave himself a mental shake and listened to the raging voices for the first time. He was somewhat surprised to realize that he recognized both of them. He pulled himself up. Angel (or Angelus, Wesley amended, taking in the vampire’s stance), his Irish accent becoming thicker as he increased the volume, towered over Darla, though she did not seem at all smaller in her furious presence.

“…going to get us killed!” Angelus was shouting, pacing to vent his frustration.

“Then we’ll leave them to their fates,” Darla replied, her voice as cold, hard, and sharp as a granite mountain peak.

Angelus spun around to face Darla and stormed up to her, growling, “Not without Dru!"

Darla rolled her eyes dramatically. “You know very well, Angelus, that we can’t bring _your_ pet without bringing _hers_. Either train the dog or set the cat free.” Darla’s voice suddenly softened, as though the granite were covered now with a thick layer of snow. Wesley now noticed that her voice was a bit hoarse, like they’d been arguing for hours. “All you have to do,” she continued, taking slow, alluring steps toward Angelus, “is take the situation…” She reached out to grab his shirt with something quite other than coldness in her voice, “…in hand.”

Wesley marveled at the speed at which the atmosphere changed. Angelus continued to glare for only a moment before a smile spread across his face. “And how do you suggest I do that?” he asked, his own hand reaching out to trace a blond curl down toward Darla’s neck. “You know Spike won’t follow instructions.”

A small smile spread across Darla’s lips. “Dear boy, haven’t you learned yet?” She leaned into Angelus’s hand as it touched her throat. “That the best way to gain obedience is not by telling others to obey. It’s so much easier to control someone if they don’t know about it.” And with that, she twisted out of Angelus’s grasp and moved swiftly toward Wesley. He had to take several very awkward steps sideways and backward to avoid being run into, so he heard, rather than saw, Angelus’s protest at Darla’s retreat.

“You suggest we give Spike the illusion of control?” Angelus asked, a malicious sort of glee in his voice coated with the passion that Darla had so adeptly struck in him. Wesley pressed up against the wall as Angelus passed and then sprinted for the other end of the room. A very promising door stood there, inviting temporary sanctuary in the assurance that no one would be using it any time soon. He fingered the handle, wondering what would happen if he broke a routine in the memory.

“No,” Darla said coyly, “I’m suggesting that you drop the subject before I get hungry. It will take me some time to get dressed to go out…”

“I see.”

When Wesley chanced a glance over his shoulder he found with horror that both vampires were missing several layers of clothing. “And it was such a quiet morning,”  he bemoaned, and reached for the door handle without any further hesitation.

Trying so very hard to ignore the growls and moans, he turned the handle and it clicked softly.

And the memory vanished.

His desk materialized, and Wesley was surprised how much reassurance and comfort he found in its sight. Several year-long seconds passed in complete and rare silence. Wesley realized that his hand was still stretched out awkwardly to turn a knob that was no longer there.

He purposefully lowered his hand.

Several deep breaths later, he wondered why he felt so hollow. He let his mind process what had happened. Maybe it was how suddenly he had been dropped into a different world, and then just as suddenly pulled back again? He now appreciated why Angel always looked so confused when they startled him out of a memory.

No, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t what he had seen—or _almost_ seen, either (and he was silently thanking the Powers that Be for sparing him from seeing any more).

 _“It’s so much easier to control someone if they don’t know about it.”_ Darla’s words echoed through his mind so softly they sounded like his own thoughts.

Wesley took another deep breath. Angel wouldn’t do that. Angel respected him. Of course, Angel hadn’t had much respect for his abilities at first, but he’d earned it since then.

 _But did you really?_ The devil in his mind asked.

The garden door opened and closed; Wesley heard it as if at a distance, but it still made him start. Cordelia’s self-assured steps marched across the floor, closely followed by another, quieter, lighter footfall. Wesley retreated back behind his desk. He sat down on the chair and stared into the tip of the pen tossed across a few papers, as though it would bring him the extra stoicism he needed. Cordy’s footsteps stopped by the office door. 

“Wesley.” 

Wesley glanced up. Something was wrong, aside from the obvious. Her eyes…Fred appeared at Cordelia’s side, solemn and unsure, gripping a bag at her shoulder. Cordy’s cheek was scratched. 

“We need to talk to Angel,” she said.

~~~~

They found Gunn and Angel standing in the hall, not speaking. Under normal circumstances, any one of them might have wondered why, but too much had happened. They were too wrapped up in their own issues to notice the awkward silence they had broken. Well, except for Fred. She wondered, but for once didn’t voice it. Instead, she noticed the way Gunn stumbled back out of the way to let them take the floor. She noticed that Wesley stopped first, farthest away from Angel. And she noticed that Angel flinched when he saw Cordy.

Cordy hadn’t told her what happened last night. With a brief apology for her lack of hospitality energy, she’d left Dennis to get a blanket and pillow for Fred and locked herself in her room the moment they’d entered the apartment. Fred had long ago learned to control her curiosity—well, in important moments such as this, anyway—and hadn’t asked any questions so far. Besides, this felt like one of those times when everything would come out anyway, no questions needed.

Angel swallowed. “You’re back,” he said to Cordy. Fred admired Angel’s bravery for speaking first; especially with Cordy standing there with crossed arms that failed to hold in the anger that Fred could tell had been steeping all night.

“I said I would be.”

“But, so early…”

“Didn’t want to give you time to practice any lame speech. Tell them what happened, Angel. Tell them this fun new turn your memories are taking—if you care enough about them to warn them, that is.”

Angel glared quietly at her, just enough to let her know he got the message.

“Something’s changed?” Wesley asked worriedly. He stepped forward, urgency overriding whatever it was that held him back in the first place. “What happened?”

Angel shifted under the weight of Cordy’s prompting stare. “I…” he began. “I don’t wake up from the memories as easily as I used to.”

“Yeah, that’s what you said last night,” Gunn said. “You wanna elaborate on that a bit?”

Angel swallowed. “I attacked Cordy last night.”

Fred gasped, and Gunn whipped his head toward Angel as if throwing daggers. “You _what_?”

“Oh dear God,” Wesley said quietly. “Are you alright?” He asked Cordy, drawing level with her and touching her shoulder.

“What did you _do_ to her?” Gunn seethed, leaving his post and marching up to Angel’s face.

“And I almost didn’t wake up from the memory in time.” Angel continued, staring through Gunn unblinkingly at Cordy.

“In time for _what_?” Gunn pressed. “What did you _do_?”

“Charles,” Fred urged, stepping forward and pulling on his elbow. “Charles let him talk.”

“Yes,” Wesley said. “Let Angel speak.”

Gunn hesitated, then took a step back and crossed his arms, intentionally placing himself between Angel and Cordelia.

Angel tried to gather his words together before speaking, but failed and just decided to go with it. “I had no idea it got that bad. If I did, I would have said something sooner.”

“About what?” Wesley asked.

“About how I can feel the memories taking over. I didn’t have much control before, but…I think it’s well beyond my ability to stop a new one from taking over. And apparently now it takes a lot more to bring me out of it than just a few words.”

“What _will_ bring you out of it?” Fred asked quietly.

Angel was quiet a moment. “Blood,” he said finally. “And a good hard punch, apparently,” he added, glancing briefly at Gunn.

They were all quiet a moment.

“Well, then.” Wesley said finally. “Weapons for everyone. No one goes anywhere alone, and—”

“And we chain Angel up so it doesn’t happen again,” Gunn finished. Wesley stared at him. “What? It’s not like he’s much help when he’s in a memory anyway. And if it’s getting’ more frequent—”

“It’s not.” Angel said. Everyone turned to him. “Before last night they were happening one right after the other. But I’ve only been involved in one, maybe two since.”

“Maybe it’s going away,” Fred said hopefully.

“Magic this intense doesn’t usually just ‘go away.’” Wesley said. “Something else much have changed, something—” Wesley stopped and everyone turned to see where he was looking. A memory-Angel and Faith had appeared and were walking down the hall toward them; Xander lay unconscious on the ground behind them. “That guy just bugs me,” memory-Angel muttered.

The group stepped aside to let them pass, but Fred wasn’t quite fast enough. They would have bumped shoulders—if memory-Angel hadn’t stopped and swerved neatly around her before resuming his normal path again. They could almost hear the real Angel swallow.

“I didn’t do that.”

Memory-Angel turned his head without slowing his pace. “You’re making it too hard, Wes. It’s not supposed to be like this.”

Then he turned back to the invisible Sunnydale streets, and he and Faith disappeared.

A stunned silence followed before Wesley spoke, staring at the now-empty hallway. “What does he mean I’m ‘taking it too hard’?”

“Um, I think he said _making_ it too hard,” Fred corrected quietly.

“And I definitely didn’t say that,” Angel said slowly.

“No duh it isn’t supposed to be like this,” Cordy muttered.

“I don’t like this,” Gunn said.

“Making it too hard?” Wesley repeated. “Making what too hard?”

“You don’t think that all the memories will just start getting minds of their own and be able to walk around without the confines of their respective time-space fragments: acting exactly like the present-day Angel to the point where we won’t even be able to tell the difference between them; until all the Angeluses get minds of their own, too, and start killing us all…do you?”

Everyone stared at Fred.

“Now I am,” Gunn said.

Fred smiled apologetically. “Sorry.”

“No, you have a good point,” Wesley said. “This is clearly the next major shift.”

“So what kind of spell,” Angel asked, “brings about a person’s memories, corporealizes them, and gives them all the intelligence—and more—of the present-day person?”

“Too hard, too hard…’It isn’t supposed to be like this’…” Wesley bit his lip and paced across the hall. “What isn’t it supposed to be like?”

“Well, we’re only supposed to have one Angel,” Fred said. “And he’s supposed to have all his memories inside his head. And—”

“—Was he saying that it’s easier than all that heavy-duty researching we did?” Gunn interrupted. “’Cause if he was…”

Wesley shushed him quiet and stopped. “It went wrong.” He said, and turned to Angel, the hopeful dawning of a new idea beginning to shine through his eyes. “Angel, let me see Johansson’s Compilation of Elementary Spells and Charms. I believe it was in a pile I gave you yesterday.”

“You gave me a beginner’s spellbook?” Angel asked incredulously.

“Angel, _please_.”

Angel glared in Wesley’s direction, but turned obligingly and pushed open the door to his room.

Too bad it wasn’t there anymore.


	9. Chapter 9

“Ok, Angel, since when did your room become a dark ally?” Gunn peered in through the door, careful not to step his foot inside, and wishing somewhere deep within that he had not decided to do the responsible thing that morning and come in to tell Angel in person that he wouldn’t be coming in anymore.

“It’s raining in there,” Fred said, tentatively holding a hand out through the doorway.

“Are you sure the book is in there, Angel?” Wesley asked.

“I’m sure it was in my _room_ ,” Angel said, squinting into the darkness at two struggling figures, trying to identify them. “That’s Faith,” he said quietly.

“So what do we do?” Fred asked, pulling her arm back into the hallway of the Hyperion. Everyone looked at each other for a moment.

“We stay here until that memory goes away,” Gunn said finally, backing up a few steps and crossing his arms in front of his chest.

“I’m afraid there’s no guarantee it will, Gunn,” Wesley said. “The memories are occurring with increasing frequency and potency. I’m not sure it’s wise to wait much longer.”

Cordelia, too, crossed her arms. “So you’re saying we should just waltz into the dark, rainy alley with a crazy psycho Slayer and just…what, exactly? Cheer her on?”

Wesley sighed almost imperceptibly. “Listen, we know that a drastic change to the memory ends it somehow—”

“Not completely.” Angel interrupted. “Last time…” he glanced briefly at Gunn. “There were still fragments.”

Wesley’s eyes fell, but he gathered himself up again. “Even so, we can be in there and disrupt the memory enough to find the book before another one starts…I think at this point it’s our only option. We certainly won’t get any farther by standing here.”

Silence fell as everyone thought about the potential consequences of willingly walking into one of Angel’s memories. Faith’s cries echoed through the alley and into the hall, “I'm evil! Do you hear me? I'm bad! Angel, I'm bad!”

“I don’t like this,” Gunn murmured.

Angel shifted uncomfortably, almost as if he were about to walk away, but decided against it.

“I don’t think any of us do,” Wesley replied quietly.

Silence fell again, and this time Fred was the only one finally willing to break it. “I agree with Wesley,” she said. “We need to find that book, and the book is in there; whether we can see it or not.” One by one, Cordy, Angel, and Gunn nodded their reluctant consent, and Wesley, sensing that he must be the one to go first, led the group into the memory.

The rain tapped cold fingers on their clothes, smoothing down their hair in chilly streams. Faith sobbed in Angel’s arms and a knife clattered to the ground, ringing exactly as it did in Wesley’s own memories of that night. Thunder rolled above them. Cordy glanced longingly behind them at the dry hallway where her hairstyle was _not_ being destroyed, but the hallway had completely disappeared. All she could see was the street at the end of the ally, cars sloshing through the small flood of rainwater. “Great…” she sighed.

“So how do we end the memory?” Gunn asked as soon as they stopped.

“I could pinch Angel,” Cordelia suggested icily.

“Ooo, I like it!” Gunn said.

“Or not,” Angel said, a little testily. “I have an idea. Follow me.” Angel broke away from the group and headed farther down the alley. Everyone looked at each other in some surprise, but followed anyway. Angel stopped in front of a door in the side of one of the buildings.

“Is exploring a big, old, creepy building part of the plan Angel?” Gunn said, glancing warily up at the crumbling concrete wall. “’Cause I like Cordy’s idea better.”

Angel glared in Gunn’s direction, but otherwise ignored him. “We go through here,” he said simply. “It’s not part of the memory, so going through it will disrupt it.”

“I don’t know…” Wesley said uncertainly. “Will it be enough?”

“If it’s warm and dry in there, I don’t care,” Cordy said. “Let’s try it.” She pushed open the door and stepped through. In her joy to find soft carpet under her feet and a roof over her head, she didn’t realize where they were at first. But as the others filed in behind her, she took notice of the appalling white wicker headboard on the bed, the antiquated flowery hats on the wall, and the downright frightening attempt at owning trendy décor (most of which belonged solidly in 1992). If that wasn’t a dead giveaway for whose bedroom this was (hint: _not_ Angel’s like it should have been), the huge stack of well-used Sunnydale High textbooks on the desk certainly was. “Willow,” Cordy sighed and rolled her eyes.

“So that didn’t work,” Cordelia said pointedly to Angel, who was pushing past the group and heading for the far wall by the door, where a fish tank stood beside a very blue JC Penny lamp in the corner.

“Ah well,” he said. “Worth a shot, right?” He studied the fish with mild interest.

Wesley frowned in puzzlement at him. He opened his mouth to speak, but Angel cut him off.

“No need to say it, Wes, we all _know_ you were right. You don’t have to rub it in all the freakin’ time.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Wesley replied, affronted. “I was going to—”

“Wesley,” Cordy interrupted, swallowing the fear back. “That’s not Angel.”

“And the award goes to the pretty lady in black.” Angelus announced, now hovering his hand over the tank where the tropical fish swam obliviously below. “Tell me, Cordy, did you choose that color today for a reason?” He plunged his hand in and pulled out one of the fish.

“I don’t understand,” Wesley said, cleaning his glasses fruitlessly on his wet shirt. “Where does the real Angel go when a memory like you takes over? And how do you know things that happened after your time?”

“Because I have _instincts_ , Wes!” Angelus snarled. He shoved his free hand deep into his pocket and pulled out a thin gold necklace, which was laced through a makeshift wire needle. He pressed the tip of it against the still-wriggling fish.

Cordelia closed her eyes and buried her face in Gunn’s arm with a moan of disgust, while Gunn himself stood in a transfixed horror. Fred, however, was looking elsewhere.

Wesley put his glasses back on and did not respond immediately. He watched, blank-faced, as Angelus pushed the needle through the fish’s head and dragged the chain through until the clasp at the end hit the shimmery scales. The fish swung like a live pendulum through the air.

“Where is Angel now?” Wesley finally asked when he had completely composed himself.

Angelus shrugged and picked out another fish. “Don’t know and really don’t care. It’s all wrong, Wes. But you know I like it that way.” The second fish flopped helplessly next to the twitching first one. Angelus held the chain up with a malicious grin. “Cordelia, give me your honest opinion, now. Will this necklace I’m making for Willow make her look fat?”

Cordelia gave him the finger in response, her eyes still hidden in Gunn’s sleeve. Angelus gave a mock “Ohhh,” of pain, and then pulled another fish out of the tank.

“How is it all wrong?” Wesley pressed.

“Well,” Angelus replied, struggling a bit with the slippery fish, “for starters, I’m killing Willow’s pets for the hell of it—I mean, it also has that nice side bonus of reminding her that I can get in and kill her, too, which is kind of fun. But really, I just like killing things. Especially when they belong to somebody else. That’s kind of wrong…” He slid the third fish down the chain, leaving a trail of blood and tiny pieces of glittering fish scale and bone as it went. “Careful, Love,” he said to Fred, who was curiously inspecting how cool the base of Willow’s lava lamp beside her bed was. “Wouldn’t want you to burn that beautiful skin of yours…”

“I meant with the spell,” Wesley said, trying to calm his frustration.

“Of course you did. But did you really think I’d tell you, Wes?”

Wesley sighed and rubbed his forehead impatiently. If Angelus wasn’t going to be of any help, they needed to get out of there. They had to find that book… He barely registered the faint sound of a plug being pulled out of a wall and the gentle splash of Angelus catching another fish before there came an almighty yell—from both Fred and Angelus. Wesley looked up in time to see the lava lamp fly across the room and hit Angelus squarely in the chest. He swore as he fell backward against the fish tank, catching the lamp by instinct and roaring with pain as it burned his hands. He threw it away as quickly as he could; the memory began to disappear, and by the time the heavy lamp went flying through the wall, the entire memory was gone.

“I’m so sorry!” she cried, hurrying over to Angel, who sat bent over his hands on the floor. “I’m so sorry, I had to do it!”

Wesley, Gunn, and Cordy rushed over across Angel’s bedroom, too, Gunn tripping over a wooden Noah’s Ark set as they went.

“I’m sorry Angel, I really didn’t want to hurt you, but I had to do _something_ , right?” Fred said.

“It’s fine,” Angel said, though he was still breathing heavily from the shock and pain. “Good work,” he said; mostly meaning it.

“Okay, from now on, we hurt Angel to get out of the memories,” Gunn said. “No more following possessed Angels and whatnot, right? I’ll volunteer to—Cordy!”

Gunn saw it first, but Angel was faster. Another Angel and a terrified-looking Fred had materialized on a horse in front of them, galloping away from an unseen foe, and Cordy was right in their path. Angel leapt up and grabbed Cordelia, pulling her out of the way just in time. They watched the memory disappear through the wall at the other end of the room, then looked at each other. Angel had inadvertently pushed her against the wall that he’d pinned her to the night before, and Angel realized that he was still holding her arms in a tight grip. He let go and backed away quickly. Cordy moved away, too, holding her arms and rubbing them.

“Angel,” Wesley said after a moment, gently. “We need the book.”

Angel nodded.

“And quickly,” Wesley said, watching another memory begin to take over the room. Angel reached the book just as the table under it disappeared, and with a sudden flash of foresight, Wesley grabbed a candle and a matchbook beside from the dresser before they, too, would vanish. They couldn’t be too prepared…


	10. Chapter 10

Gunn was the first one in a long time to speak. "So this one time we were doing a raid on a vamp nest and I ended up locked in a room in this old building. It took the gang hours to find me so I was just left with this ugly-ass wallpaper to stare at for nearly twelve hours." Gunn kicked at the moldy straw at his feet. "You know what? I miss that wallpaper."

He shuffled away from the rank smell that he had accidentally unearthed on the floor of their own private cell deep in the 18th century Tower of London. He didn't care to know how long they'd been there, but he knew it was well beyond Long Enough. Wesley stood in a corner with the book, furiously pouring through it, trying to find what he was looking for. Fred held a lit candle for him so he could see the text.

"I don't know," She said. "I kind of like it, in a weird way. It's quiet and peaceful."

The scream from a tortured prisoner broke the absolute outside silence.

"Private beaches are peaceful," Cordelia said. "This is just disturbing." She shifted a foot to a slightly less disgusting part of the floor. "And plus," she added, "It smells in here."

"And there are rats," Gunn shivered. "Remind me again why we're not hitting Angel and gettin' the hell out of here?"

"Because it's safe for now," Wesley said, squinting in the little light there was from his candle at the words in the book (Gunn snorted quietly, glancing warily at the darker corners of the dungeon where tiny shadows flitted about in the wavering light). "If we end this memory, another will start, and we have no idea what it might be. We stay here until we get some answers."

"Find anything yet?" Fred asked hopefully.

Gunn rolled his eyes. "We'll know when he's found something, Fred. He gets all excited and starts shouting…"

"And bouncing," Cordy added. "He definitely bounces. There's even occasional dancing. But—"

"Oh! Yes!" Wesley cried.

"See?" Cordy said.

"I've found it," Wesley said, " _without_  bouncing, thank you, or a great deal of yelling."

"Relax, man," Gunn said, clapping Wesley on the shoulder, "I'm so happy we're finally gettin' some answers,  _I_  just might bounce a little."

"What is it?" Angel asked, also crowding around Wesley.

"Hold on a minute; let me finish the passage."

Angel, Cordy, Gunn, and Fred waited in anxious silence, trying to ignore the patter of rat feet in the corners of the room and the bite of tiny bugs nesting in the straw. Eventually, Cordelia began tapping her foot.

"Come on, Wes, the memories aren't going away by themselves, you know."

"Alright," Wesley said, glancing up, "I  _think_  I know how this happened. Angel, does this look familiar?"

Angel leaned forward to look at the picture in the book that Wesley held out to him. "Hey!" he said. "That's the statue that old guy that ran into me the other night was holding."

"I thought so," Wesley nodded. "It's the Rumford Spell, named after the inventor, Thomas Rumford. It's actually rather complicated, considering it's a laymen's spell. Quite harmless, usually, but if done incorrectly…"

The sound of metal scraping through a lock interrupted Wesley and everyone turned toward the rattling door.

"Oh good, let's get out of here," Cordy said, and led the way toward the opening door.

"What does it do, Wes?" Angel asked as they all gratefully followed Cordelia. "How does it work?"

"It's a spell to corporealize the memory of one's younger self. To essentially make real the person that the caster once was."

"Oh thank God!" Cordy cried in front of them, and thinking that she was back in the hotel, Wesley and Angel hurried after her. Instead, Angel found himself outside, sunlight blinding him and he instinctively ducked, searching wildly for a place to hide before he realized that he wasn't on fire. Cordelia, meanwhile, was spreading her arms out as if to catch as many ray of sun as she could. Even Gunn stood blinking gratefully at their sun-filled and rat-free surroundings.

"Angel!" Wesley hurried to Angel's side to help shield the sun.

"It's okay, Wes." Angel said, squinting out across the landscape. It looked rather like Earth…except for the double sun. Angel glanced around them. They were standing halfway up a large hill specked with boulders. Angel and Fred had ridden the horse through here. "It's another memory," he finished. The Angel said to the group at large, "Let's start walking. Find a place to sit down, and Wes can finish telling us what's going on. And how to stop it."

They headed down the hill, Cordelia in the lead. She prompted, "So this spell brings the body of your past self to the present."

"Well, essentially," Wesley said, "only it's a physical memory rather than your literal past self, as I said." He sighed with a slight exasperation at having to repeat himself and stepped over a fallen branch.

"Why would anyone want to do that?" Gunn asked. "Wouldn't having two of you be confusing?"

"That's only the first part of the spell," Wesley answered. "When the spell is complete, the entire essence of the person is transferred into the memory and the real body dies. It's sort of a way to—"

"—live forever." Angel finished.

"Essentially." Wesley confirmed. "It's mostly used by elderly people who are more afraid of death than the consequences of magic. "

"Hold on," Cordy stopped and swiveled around to face the group, holding up a hand. "Does this mean that Angel's going to die? 'Cause, despite me not really liking him right now, that's bad."

"My body's already dead," Angel said. "It wouldn't work." Angel suddenly looked to Wesley for confirmation. "Right?"

"Theoretically, yes" Wesley said. "But I don't think that's an issue. You see, the spell has to be initiated with a very precise ritual—which I am almost sure was not done correctly, or there would be another Angel walking about which the memories would have filtered into—and I highly doubt whoever started this would complete it when the first part was performed on someone else." He glanced over at Angel. "You weren't supposed to touch that statue. When the man went home that night and incorrectly performed the spell, the god represented by that statue brought forth your memories; not his. When he saw that it was the wrong person, I imagine he aborted the attempt."

"But it was too late," Angel finished, pulling the pieces together himself. "The memories had already started appearing, only they didn't have a vessel to go into."

"Exactly," Wesley said, with a self-satisfied smile. "It was all wrong, as Angel's memories have been trying to tell us."

"You know what else is wrong?" Cordy said darkly, her eye narrowing on something behind them all. She pointed, "That."

Everybody turned. Fred was still halfway up the hill where they had emerged. She was on the ground, crying, her soft sobs only just reaching across the few hundred feet that separated them, and an Angel wearing leather pants and a deep red shirt cradled her gently, whispering things to her with a sharply joyful glint in his eye.

Wesley's heart stopped. The rest of the world seemed to lose its color like chalk drawings in rain. As if his ears were a filter to any sound but hers and the monster's that held her, he only heard muffled versions of Angel and Gunn's curses, and he couldn't hear the cheerful singing of the birds at all. It was like everything but Fred, Angelus, and Wesley were just another fading memory.

He watched the others rush back up the hill. He watched Angelus brush a hand across her cheek, and is voice, almost magnified in Wesley's terror for Fred, echo down to him.

"You see, Fred?" he said soothingly. "I told you they would notice eventually. You're not  _completely_  alone." Angelus' grin became even more wicked, and his hand suddenly tightened around Fred's jaw. She gasped and Angelus warned the others to stay back with a snarl that Wesley could feel in his gut. They stopped and Wesley watched them through the gap between Angel and Gunn, their clenched fists framing Fred and Angelus. Then Angelus frowned, as though Fred's pain hurt him, too. "Listen to her. She hasn't stopped since you all got here…"

Wesley listened. He didn't have a choice; it was the only thing he could hear.

"No, no," Fred was crying into Angelus' shirt, a fist grabbing the folds as though if she let go she would lose her sanity entirely. "You never leave here," she sobbed. "Pylea never lets you go."

"Isn't she  _beautiful_?" Angelus smiled. "And I hardly said anything."

Wesley's stomach dropped to his feet and he suddenly remembered, as though seeing the pages again, his extensive studies on Angelus' exploits; particularly a certain unfortunate young Seer. A fire of rage and life began to burn in Wesley's feet. He glanced down at the book in his hand, fumbled shakily through a few pages, and then he stumbled forward.

Angel was trying to soothe Fred. He stretched out an anxious hand. Angelus pulled her in closer, and Fred kept whispering

"Once you get in you never come out again." She sobbed harder. "You never leave Pylea…"

"I know it's bad form to do a masterpiece twice," Angelus said softly, gently brushing Fred's hair away from her neck. "But Drusilla turned out so perfect…" He looked up at Wesley with a malicious glee. "So who wants to see if a memory can turn someone?"

Wesley's legs found more life and he could feel his heart again. He broke into a half-jog. Angel was growling for Fred to be let go; Gunn was demanding to know what Angelus had meant by that comment – some truths were too much for him to face – and Cordelia was standing with one hand outstretched toward Fred, whispering an antidote to Angelus's poison.

Angelus grinned at Wesley as he walked past the others to stand directly in front of Fred and Angelus. "Finally joining the party, Wes? Or do you want to consult your books before we vote on dear Fred's fate?"

Wesley stared coldly back; so coldly that when he remembered this moment, even years later, he remembered it in black and white. "I want to offer you some advice." He said. "In exchange for the hint you gave me, however unintentionally."

Angelus grinned wider. "And what would that be?"

"Leave. Put Fred down unharmed, and I might consider putting you back in Angel's head when I reverse the spell."

Angelus gently pushed some of the hair from Fred's face as she continued to sob. "Doesn't sound very tempting, Wes, considering that there  _is_  no reversal spell in that cute little book of yours."

Wesley smirked his best Head Boy smirk. "Oh, but there is, in a fashion. I can adapt an anti-forgetfulness spell to filter Angel's memories back into his head. You might wonder, now, what might happen if I failed to perform the spell correctly? What if some of those memories didn't make it back?" He paused for dramatic effect. "You, for example. I assure you that you'll lose your substance once the spell is broken."

The playfulness left Angelus instantly. He stood up, pulling Fred up roughly with him. She gasped as he yanked her arm, and suddenly the rest of Wesley's senses came rushing back, poised and ready to do whatever it was he had to. Angelus bared his teeth at Wesley. "You couldn't," he hissed.

"You can?" Gunn started to ask, but Wesley held up a hand to silence him.

Wesley nodded to the ocean waves that had started to lap against the bottom of the hill. "I suggest making your decision before this memory falls apart." Wesley suggested reasonably.

Several seconds of silence seemed to stretch for hours. Then Angelus shoved Fred away from him with an angry growl—Gunn only just managed to catch her fall—and stalked away into the fading landscape.

The others stared at Wesley and then all spoke at once.

"This has  _got_  to stop. Now."

"Thanks, Wes…"

"You can get rid of evil-Angel forever?"

"…Good job."

"And you didn't tell us?"

"Stop." Wesley held out a hand, his shoulders slumping a little. "Is Fred alright?"

Gunn shrugged helplessly. "We need to get her out of here," he said. Looking warily at the ship sailing across the increasing expanse of ocean, he added, "But it looks like that's being taken care of."

"But can you do it?" Cordelia asked.

Wesley rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Well, I can certainly adapt the anti-forgetfulness spell to filter the memories back into Angel….I might have exaggerated my ability to choose which memories."

Gunn's shoulders fell slightly.

Cordelia inspected Wesley for a few moments. She nodded her approval. "Way to go, Wes."

"Can you do it now?" Angel asked.

Wesley shook his head. "Unfortunately not. There are some things we need from my store of supplies downstairs."

"Of course we do," Cordelia muttered under her breath.

"I vote we get outta this memory first," Gunn said, still watching the ocean flooding nearer. "Being as I don't really wanna go swimming right now…"

"Over there," Wesley pointed toward the top of the hill, where another, much dryer memory of a late 19th century hotel had appeared under a night sky, though the suns still shone brightly in Wesley's eyes. As they stumbled up the hill as best they could, Wesley stopped briefly to pick several flowers he'd nearly stepped on. It was as close to a common earth wildflower as he thought they might find, and one of the ingredients he needed for the spell.

Then he rushed after the others, shoes damp with ocean water, and praying that he would still have the flowers in the next memory.


	11. Chapter 11

For the sixth time that day (yes, he counted), Gunn punched Angel and the memory that had been playing out faded back into obscurity, another one already in its place. Angel leaned over the deep red couch that had been in his Sunnydale mansion and massaged his now-aching jaw.

"Excellent!" Wesley said once he realized where they were. "Angel, you wouldn't have any peat moss here, would you?"

"No," Angel said, "but there might be some in that swamp by the fireplace…" he pointed, and Wesley rushed over to the edge of the murky bog, where a dark, damp tree wound its way up through the ghost-like chimney and a thick fog was beginning to form on top of the water.

"How many more ingredients do you need, Wesley?" Fred asked eagerly, also bouncing over to the bog and plopping down next to the water as if next to a picnic basket that contained the most delicious chocolate cake she'd ever tasted. Though all were glad that Wesley had found a way to get the ingredients he needed, Fred was the most outwardly excited—a little overly so. Wesley guessed that it was her way of coping with being back in Pylea, if briefly; her inner pendulum swung to the other extreme much more quickly than the rest of theirs did. He wasn't entirely sure if that was a good thing or not, but he didn't have much time to think about it now.

"Only a solid piece of silver," Wesley replied.

"I have a ring," Cordelia offered, holding up her hand to display it. In fact, she wore several rings, but only one of them was pure silver (and her father had paid for it, so she didn't  _really_  mind losing it—especially if it meant getting out of Angel's past for good).

"It's too small," Wesley said. "It has to conduct a lot of energy to channel 250 years' worth of memories back into Angel." Pockets now bulging with peat moss, he looked over at Angel, who was still leaning against the back of the couch. "Would you have anything here that—"

But before Wesley could finish, the scenery shifted yet again and Angel disappeared behind an old wooden wall. Wesley caught a glint of something sharply evil in Angel's eye just before the wall separated them, and Wesley stood quickly and positioned himself in front of Fred.

"That's it! We're putting a leash on him!" Cordy cried in complete exasperation. They were now in the hallway of an old inn—not that she cared where they were anymore—the fires of hell ominously eating away at the wood at one end of the hall. "Wesley, we're never going to get anywhere if the guy we need to stuff these memories back into isn't even here…Physically  _or_  mentally." She added in a mutter. "Isn't there anyway to do the spell without the ingredients and without Angel?" She asked.

"Without the ingredients:  _maybe_. Except for the silver; that's critical. And Angel absolutely must be a part of it."

"Then we'd better snap him out of it… _Again_." Gunn said. "Any idea which of these doors—"

A sudden thud and crash in the room on the other side of the nearest door to Gunn made them jump. Voices shouted, one screamed, and a few laughed.

"Oh. Never mind," Gunn muttered. Being the designated Get-Angel-Out-Of-A-Memory-By-Punching-Him puncher, he positioned himself in front of the door, tightening his sore fist. It wasn't like his knuckles were made of steel, he thought begrudgingly, even though the violence was a bit cathartic. Gunn stretched out his free hand and grabbed the doorknob as though his task were as routine as brewing the morning coffee—which it almost was.

"Be careful," Wesley said.

"Yeah, yeah," Gunn replied. He took a breath, psyching himself up, and burst through the door. Gunn would never tell them what he saw, though they could hear him choke back the vomit, and a rank smell made them all nauseas before the door slammed shut behind him. A few minutes later, the scene shifted again—this time to a dark room—Angel massaged yet another part of his jaw, and the group huddled close together in the new darkness, trying to figure out where they were now.

"Could you stop going for the jaw, Gunn?" Angel said in exasperation.

"You want me to hit somewhere  _lower_ , I'd be happy to oblige," Gunn replied with as much ice as he could muster, his eyes still wide and horrified as he leaned against the wall for support. "I'll even use my foot instead of my fist."

Angel glared at him.

No one said anything for a few minutes, all worn down almost to capacity and trying to gather themselves up again. Except for Fred, that is, who was searching their surroundings for something large and silver with an intense kind of fervor. She was tugging on the silver handle of an old blue police box when Angel grabbed her hand.

"Fred…Fred, don't…No really Fred, that's not going to be big enough." Angel gently but firmly pulled her away from the box, eying it apprehensively as he took Fred to sit on a bench that was made of absolutely no metal.

Cordelia stared at the floor, arms crossed tightly against her stomach, not seeing either the balmy corridor to her right or the evergreen blizzard to her left, and her head pounding and completely done with this whole ordeal. She breathed in deeply and out again, but the technique wasn't working as well as it used to. Cordelia was just thinking about how  _didn't_  want to think about what all the stress was doing to her skin, when she realized that the floor looked slightly familiar. She didn't often look at the ground when she walked, but you couldn't tread those tiles for four very memorable years and not recognize them.

Cordelia jumped as Jenny Calendar ran suddenly past her, breathing hard gasps of air that sounded painful, and stumbling as she glanced behind her. Cordy's stomach turned over and she swallowed against the rising bile. She knew exactly which memory this was. She hadn't been present for this one, but they all had imagined it enough times with varying degrees of guilt, horror, and grief for her to be reasonably sure.

Miss Calendar looked forward again and screamed in surprise as she ran into Angelus' waiting arms. He clamped his hand over Miss Calendar's mouth.

"Sorry, Jenny. This is where you get off."

Cordy wanted to close her eyes, but she watched anyway. When Angelus snapped Jenny's neck and let her fall to his feet, the loud, sinewy  _crack_  mirrored something inside Cordy, and she finally snapped, too.

Without thinking about what she was doing, Cordelia marched over to Angelus and just as he was remarking how he never got tired of doing that, Cordy pulled back and decked him as hard as she could. He stumbled away, trying to regain his balance. Somewhere behind Cordy, she heard Gunn mutter in surprise and slight admiration, "Damn…" Jenny faded away and as Angel looked up, holding his jaw where she had hit him.

She did not apologize. All the anger she had been bottling since the previous night boiled to the surface. Everything else seemed to fade away into the background. It was all wall paint. Breathing heavily with rage, she glared at him standing there, crouched over and recovering from the shock of her blow.

"You really did it. You killed her." She seethed.

"Yeah, I killed her. You know that." Angel straightened up, still massaging his jaw, staring at her bewilderedly. " _Ow_."

"Do you even  _care_?"

Angel's eyes narrowed. "Of course I care. I just don't get why you're so mad at me now, for this. That was years ago and, in case you've forgotten, we're in the middle of a crisis here."

"You don't see how I'm mad at you? Hm, let's think, Angel, what could possibly have happened between us to make me mad at you?"

"Jenny Calendar had nothing to do with last night," Angel's voice rose with his temper and he shoved a little harder than he normally would have against a version of himself that had drunkenly fallen into him. The scene had shifted to a noisy Irish pub, filled with out-of-place and out-of-time memory fragments that, for the first time, no one noticed.

"She has  _everything_  to do with last night! You were a friend, and then you were suddenly evil without any warning whatsoever, and you hurt the people who cared about you. That's what last night is all about, Angel. It's about you balancing between the guy who always feels the consequences of his actions and the guy who doesn't even know what 'consequence' means. It's about you being predictable and good and safe when you have a soul and being evil and nasty and dangerous when you don't. But most of all," she took a deep breath, "it's about you scaring the hell out of me when I thought you couldn't."

Silence fell over the group as Cordy paused to take a few breaths. She hadn't quite known that the last part was true, but it made perfect sense. No one behind her spoke. Cigarette smoke curled past her nose, but she hardly noticed. Angel stared at her, his face expressionless, though she knew he was processing her words. Somewhat calmed, she continued.

"I know you have a dark side, Angel. You're a vampire. I have every reason to be afraid of you. We all do. Even with your soul, if you want to you can turn on us at any moment and there's really nothing we can do about it. We deal with it by convincing ourselves there's nothing to be afraid of at all. That's worked really well for me these past five years. No soul equals terror; soul equals friend. But what happened last night completely shattered that nice little paradigm. You want to know why? Because there  _wasn't supposed to be a middle ground_. You hurt me when you went dark and fired us, Angel, but before last night I was  _never_  afraid of you."

Angel stared intently at her. "So you're mad because I gave you a reason to fear me? Cordy, you  _should_ —"

Cordy shook her head. "Oh, no. Don't give me that 'you should be afraid of me because I'm a bad, bad demon with a dark past' crap. I know there are parts of you to fear Angel; I've known that ever since you tried to have that blue guy burn us all up. What keeps us friends now is that I'm not afraid of you. Or at least, that I know when not to be afraid of you. But suddenly last night I didn't know. Now I'm just trying to figure out how to deal with it."

Angel nodded silently and hesitated. "Is there anything I can do to help?" He asked.

"Just…give me time."

Angel nodded again and silence fell between them. After a few moments, Wesley ventured cautiously, "Cordelia?"

She turned, "I know, Wes. Let's get out of here. Something metal right?"

Wesley nodded. "Silver, specifically. It's molecular structure is such that –" but he stopped, looking over Cordelia's shoulder in speechless horror.

" _I_  have something."

Cordelia was always amazed at how easy it was to tell Angel from Angelus. Her body felt the same horror that Wesley showed just by hearing him so close behind her. It was the amusement in his voice, like she was just about to become the butt of a cruel joke; a level of snide that even Cordelia was better at than Angel. She clenched her fist. Sure, she had gotten a lot off of her chest, but punching Angelus out of Angel had been nearly as therapeutic – if not more so.

Cordelia was also amazed at how the speed of thought surpasses time, and in less than a second, she realized some very important things. She realized that something was wrong: while the rowdy sounds of a pub barraged her from behind, the Sunnydale school had shifted back to the Sunnydale mansion. But this time she saw the stone statue that was slowly opening its mouth, hellfire and damnation swirling with screams inside it, and she saw the slow-motion terror on the other's faces as they ran toward her. She remembered, from some dusty, uncovered part of her mind, a brief conversation with Xander Harris about how Buffy and Angelus' final battle had been with swords, and it rang painfully in her head. And she realized that she knew she wouldn't have time to duck before Angelus swung at her.

Her eyes closed reflexively and her arms moved to protect herself; but before they were even halfway up, a sickeningly wet sound of the sword hitting flesh made everyone stop and cringe.

But the sword hadn't hit her.

She cracked her eyes open and turned. There were two versions of Angel instead of one standing behind her. Angelus pushed at the sword already lodged in the other man's collarbone, pure hatred in his eyes. Liam looked blurrily at the sword and the blood pouring from his wound like it hadn't quite registered through his inebriated fog. Angelus pulled the sword out and prepared to slice his human half's head clean off this time. And then Gunn's fist slammed into Angel's head for the last time that night.

Angel stumbled away and dropped the sword, which clanged on the stone floor. The human memory gave Gunn an exaggerated nod of thanks, swayed on his feet and collapsed.

Fred was the first to move. She quietly made her way to the sword and timidly picked it up; blood slid down the blade in a tiny stream and dripped off the point. Gunn knelt next to the dying Liam and turned to look at Wesley. "What do we do?" he asked.

"I'm not sure there's anything we can do," Wesley stammered, waving at the quickly growing pool of blood.

"We do the spell," Angel said, standing up and for once ignoring his throbbing jaw. He looked at his past self with an unreadable expression. "Put him back in my head. We have all the pieces." He made a point not to look at the sword in Fred's hands.

Wesley nodded, swallowed, and without further hesitation or thought, set to work drawing a hasty circle on the ground with the fresh blood. "Fred, Gunn, Cordelia? I'll need the ingredients you have."

The others moved off, searching their pockets for the various ingredients that Wesley had given them to carry and leaving Angel standing with himself and a feeling of sick fascination. He cautiously approached Liam, kneeling down and taking the place at his side that Gunn had left. So many emotions ran through him: relief, jealousy, anger, confusion…it made him feel lightheaded.

He stared down at his past self and tried to make sense of everything. He couldn't pretend this wasn't real; that his human self was not dying in front of him and that he had not just sacrificed himself without hesitation. Clearly, it was the fact that this  _was_  real that they were trying so desperately to fix. But it had never been quite as real to him as it was now, and he wasn't sure why. Angel cocked his head and watched the life spurt out of Liam.

"Why?" He asked finally, quiet enough so that the others wouldn't hear him.

Liam stared at him; his breath gurgled. Wesley called out for Angel to come and stand in the circle, but Angel didn't move.

"Because…" Liam coughed out a few mouthfuls of blood. He looked Angel in the eye and they stared at each other for a moment. "Because I'm not as bad as you think I am." He gave Angel a drunken smile. " _Either_  of you."

" _Angel!_ "

He glanced at the others, and then turned back at Liam. He didn't smile in return; but for himself he didn't really think he needed to. He stood.

"You might be right," Angel said, and walked toward his friends, leaving his human self like he had always remembered him: dying.


	12. Chapter 12

Angel sat, as usual, alone in his room, mulling (he preferred that term to "brooding") over the past week.

The spell had worked. That was what mattered, in the end. The spell worked, the memories rushed back into Angel, and the Hyperion went instantly back to normal.

The  _people_  in the Hyperion, however…Gunn left as soon as he could and did not return for a couple of days. Cordelia stayed long enough to realize that she, too, needed to be alone, though she came back sporadically to keep the office work quietly, briefly under control. Angel did not know what she would do or say when she sorted out…whatever she needed to sort out; and he half-welcomed, half-dreaded the conversation that she would undoubtedly have with him when she did. Wesley barricaded himself in his office and did not emerge until everything was organized and put away to his high standards, though he graciously accepted Angel's momentary company on the few occasions he came downstairs. Fred recovered the fastest, though as Wesley expressed the wish to organize and file alone, and everyone else had shut themselves up in their various abodes, there wasn't much for her to do but the same.

But they could not stay separated for very long. Cordy had a vision and Gunn was called on to help, which he did without question. Slowly, their lives began to resume a semblance of normalcy, because they had to.

Perhaps the push back to routine helped Cordelia reach a conclusion faster, or perhaps she was just that good at dealing with her own emotions, but it didn't take her as long as Angel thought to finally come up to his room one afternoon just over a week after it had all ended.

"Come in," he said after she knocked. Cordy stepped in and Angel's insides clenched a bit in apprehension. She gave him a slight smile as she closed the door behind her.

"Hey," she said. He just watched as she crossed the room to him and sat down on the edge of his bed opposite him. "So, we need to talk."

"I know," he replied tensely.

She nodded, gave him a small smile (presumably to ease his discomfort, but it didn't help) and pulled in a breath. "Angel…what I said to you before is still true." (Somewhere in his mind, Angel cursed. This couldn't bode well.) "You hurt me and you scared me. And I'm not too thrilled with you that you weren't completely open about what was going on. I've been trying really hard not to think about what would have happened if that memory played itself out."

Angel swallowed, trying to push away the painful grip the fist had inside and likewise not think about what almost happened.

"I've also been trying to figure out how to deal with the whole thing," she continued. "Before, I could sort of separate you into categories, and I knew which ones were dangerous and which ones weren't. But I can't fit the you from that night into any of those categories. And I'm not talking about you being in the memory of Angelus, or whoever that was a memory from—I know spells make people do things they wouldn't otherwise do."

Angel swallowed again, hoping she wasn't going to ask about said memory. There was no need for that night with Darla to come up if it didn't have to.

"I'm talking about you letting things get bad enough for something like that to happen and  _not telling us_. I know you didn't mean to, but the fact is, you did. For the past few days I've tried to process things and put them into their proper categories, and the conclusion I've come to is…I can't." Cordelia raised her hands in a sign of defeat. "I've been thinking about it, and nothing good can come out of this knowledge that you can scare me beyond reason; which, let me say right now I don't get scared beyond reason often—even considering where I grew up  _and_  our line of work." Her hands had dropped and she gave Angel an almost playful glance, as if daring him to question her battle-hardened nerves. Then she sighed and glanced back down at her hands. "So I'm just going to let it go," she continued. "What we do here, Angel: you and me, Seer and Champion; it's too important to let something like that get in the way. And our friendship means more to me than…well, most things. So I guess what I'm saying is," she glanced up, "we're good. Just…don't let anything like that happen again. Ever. Okay?" She looked at him through raised eyebrows, her expression not yet friendly enough for Angel to be reasonably sure that she actually was letting it go, or if her playful glance before hadn't just been wishful thinking on his part; but the fist around his stomach eased anyway.

"I won't." He promised, with equal solemnity.

"Good." She relaxed a bit. "And there's one more thing." The fist inside Angel tensed again. "What I remember most about the whole memory ordeal was how scared I was knowing that you might try to hurt me again—even unintentionally. It almost happened multiple times to all of us."

Angel dropped his gaze. "Cordy, I really can't say how sorry I am…"

Cordy held up a hand. "I know, so do us both a favor and don't try. I'm just saying that when you came at me that night, all I could do is think that you weren't there to save me. Angel, you've saved me more times than I want to count. I'm sick of needing protection all the time." She paused to take a breath. "It's come to the point where I really can't be a part of this team anymore if I can't defend myself."

The fist inside Angel clenched harder than ever and bile rose in his throat. He swallowed and somehow managed to ask, "So what are you going to do?"

Cordelia stared at him and waited a moment. It was agonizing, and Angel was sure it was entirely intentional. Finally, Cordelia said, "I'm going to ask you to train me."

Angel started. "Train you?"

"Yeah. What, you have a better idea? You didn't think I was going to leave or something, did you? Not after that whole what-we-do-is-too-important-and-our-friendship-means-a-lot-to-me speech."

Angel shook his head quickly. "No, of course not."

Cordy smirked. "Ok, then. When do we start?" An eager grin spread on her face. "Can we start now?"

"Now?"

"Yeah. I haven't had a vision in a few days, so I'm feeling pretty good." She smiled and punched the air playfully to show she was ready. "What d'you say?"

Her smile was contagious. A grin—the first in a long time—appeared on Angel's face.

"Now works for me," he said.

**The End**


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